The answer depends a lot on what you decide "Uber" means (the article talks about "User Needs", which is a good lens to make this decision through). For riders

The answer depends a lot on what you decide "Uber" means (the article talks about "User Needs", which is a good lens to make this decision through). For riders, not having to locate and setup the service is going to matter at least some of the time, and is not well addressed by local systems. I don't think blockchain is likely to be the answer either. It adds enough complexity that things anyway end up "centralized" in the primary implementation of the system, so you might as well directly implement something that isn't all turned inside out to enable blockchain storage.