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Originally Posted by Shoe
No, their "app" as you call it has revolutionized the industry and is much more complex than a simple GPS app. The main reason it did not exist before is because taxi monopolies did not have enough reason to invest in making one, as just putting people on hold and making them wait up to 30 minutes for a taxi to arrive was considered standard practice and consumers had no other choice.
This is just wrong. I've traveled widely and there are many cities where you can order a taxi and have it at your door in under 5 minutes at any time of the day or night. Where that's not the case, it's not because of lack of an app or because of routing problems that Uber has solved that others haven't.
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The app is not nearly as easy to write as you make it seem, and there really was no excuse for taxi companies not to develop their own, other than they had a monopoly so didn't have to.
You're acting like advanced vehicle routing software doesn't exist (hint: it does)
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Now that Uber is a threat to taxi companies I expect them to come up with similar apps/technology and start providing much better service, which will be a blow to Uber but a benefit to the consumer (probably still several months to a year or more away -- but if you really think a college student can write this in a few days they should do so and sell their version to every taxi company, you could easily sell this as a skin to every cab company across the country/world who don't have enough resources to develop their own). Whoever does a better job going forward will win out, right now that is Uber.
Uber's advantage is not what you think. It's three things:
- Their app uses an existing account and your phone's GPS, such that you get pickup with a few button presses
- They ignore regulations while their competitors are bound by them; where others pay up to a million dollars for a taxi medallion, Uber drivers pay nothing; where taxi companies have payroll costs and major compliance costs, Uber drivers are merely background checked, then work for a pittance using their own vehicles in an unsustainable way. This means far lower prices. Nearly all of their price advantage comes from this fact, not routing.
- Scarcity of taxi medallions in many areas means that there are only a certain number of taxis allowed to be on the road, which is often insufficient. Drivers who flout these laws can work busy times and fill the gap, or oversupply an area for fast pickup (given that drivers often want money now rather than money later, even if they're working for nothing in the longer run).
That's it. There isn't some super duper magical VRP solving algorithm that means you get pickup way faster and far cheaper. I can get a taxi to my door in <5 minutes, reliably, every time, where I live. One of the reasons Uber and Lyft did so well in San Francisco is because there was an enormous taxi shortage caused by
artificially and perversely limiting the supply to far too few medallions. That's just not true in many parts of the world.
You're completely misattributing the cause of their advantages. It's not their routing.