> Not my experience using taxi call services in Chicago. Whenever I called them (before Uber) the taxi was prompt and courteous. Not remotely my experience in

> Not my experience using taxi call services in Chicago. Whenever I called them (before Uber) the taxi was prompt and courteous. Not remotely my experience in Chicago, and I lived in a relatively primary service area (Wicker Park). Calling them was basically pointless, you needed to walk to a cab stand and hope there was a cab standing by if you needed to go to the airport at a weird off-peak time. And my friends all had similar experiences to mine as well. It was a trope that you'd call dispatch and schedule a ride, and then maybe it would show up within 90 minutes of the actual time assigned. You could even listen to the dispatch radio and realize how much of a shitshow it was with cabbies assigned to a pickup ditching it for a street fare randomly. And how little dispatch cared about it all. Uber was a night and day overnight change for the better. The only "good" cab experiences were flag pulls from the street within short city trips. Usually the loop to back home during peak after-work or bar traffic times. Anything else was frustrating to outright unusable.