First, I hate having to have multiple apps to do the same thing. That would drive me crazy for every city. I would pay a premium not to do that.

Second, none of these apps I have seen thus far even attempts to make it easier for the user to add payment methods. Each time I need to put in my credit card information? Twice if I am on business? Nobody has taken advantage of Apple or Android pay integration.

I don't consider myself a heavy cab user, but I probably take at least ~200 rides a year, and unless the city is regulated (credit cards) I am using Lyft.

> That would drive me crazy for every city

Most people only go to another city once or twice a year, so it's not a significant issue for them.

But is that true for most people who use Uber, or even taxis? I wouldn't be surprised if a large portion of Uber/taxi users were in fact people traveling to a different city.

I would be surprised. At least in New York, people use taxis very often, and thus use Uber very often. I'd wager the vast majority of Uber usage is in people's home towns/cities.

Personally, I use other apps when in NYC, but fall back to Uber when I'm somewhere else and can't find a local app.

I'd definitely like to see some numbers on this. A lot of the people I know don't travel and use Uber frequently.

This is exactly what got me to use Uber initially. I can show up in San Francisco, or London, or my tiny hometown where cabs take 45 minutes to arrive, and Uber will work the same way for about the same price. Having a robust, universal way of getting places really does matter to a lot of people.

Where I grew up, the vast majority of people I knew very rarely left the county they lived in - even though it was only a couple of hours to New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC. By the time I moved to Philadelphia, my social circle was much more likely to travel - but on the whole, the greater population of the city tends to stay within the city ("I have everything I need here, why would I bother with the hassle of going somewhere else?")

There, now we've both shared our experiences!

Hm, ok. We'll here in Europe things are a bit different. Most people travel, it is pretty easy to do so and even the 'poor' (students, people that only have bikes) move from city to city regularly.

I've got acquaintances from all over the planet though, and even there most people travel with some regularity to other cities. Holidays, family visits and so on, and then of course there is business travel which I would assume is one of the larger customer groups for Uber/taxis.

You must have only well-to-do acquaintances then... Or I'm misreading all the negatives in your statement.

No, it's a small country and relatives usually live in other towns.

The first point is key, especially when you're not familiar with the city. I rarely use either Uber or Lyft in my home city, but now Lyft is the first thing I launch when landing in a new place, and that's all domestic US travel, forgetting international. It can't really be discounted how important the multi-city, single app feature is to these services for travelers.

My first ever use of Uber was in another country, after about 40 hours awake and traveling. Even with the hurdles of setting up an account, it was vastly easier than getting local transit for my route. (As checked later when I was functional.) That's a huge benefit that none of the proposed alternatives (bar Lyft) can offer.

>First, I hate having to have multiple apps to do the same thing

Don't worry, once there are enough apps someone will figure out how to scrape and aggregate the info. The same thing happened when airlines and hotels started putting booking info online except at the time it was websites instead of apps.

Scraping and aggregating airline info is not really comparable. Airline data is based on predetermined schedules and is relatively static.

Ride hailing is extremely fluid. Must be real-time. Must be able to provide GPS coordinates of the user to the service in question.

I don't think you'll see an aggregation app until there is some ride hailing standard that is adopted by the various providers.

Google Maps is already starting down this road a bit (admittedly only with the big companies). That's the likeliest path in terms of companies that have the leverage as well as the existing technology to make this happen.

You don't need a standard, the taxi companies just all need some API. Apps like "Transit App" will just integrate them all.

> You don't need a standard, the taxi companies just all need some API

But what does that API look like? What are the MVP operations required to make a successful ride hailing API? Will that API provide realtime location info of the driver, or allow payment, or <insert myriad of questions here>.

Without a standard, the Taxi API landscape will be a mess.

> Apps like "Transit App" will just integrate them all

This is a pretty major oversimplifications of this issue. Sure, this is technically possible, but it sounds like a horrible solution.

Bringing in the considerations about the actual API design, this also means that user experience may vary wildly depending on which service they're interacting with.

Can != should. If aggregating many systems is the future, we should push for a technical solution that doesn't suck.

You're overcomplicating the issue - a lot. The important thing is that the ride sharing systems provide APIs that show the time and the price, to allow users to compare. The next step is that the service providers and apps can work together on payment, which is really the complicated part. Following the booked cars in real time is simple in comparison.

Not having some API standard is usually how it's done with many services nowadays, and the market/comparison apps have to integrate multiple APIs. Big deal.

Guess we just have to agree to disagree. API design matters. A lot. "As long as they provide some API" doesn't really cut it if you want a system that functions well. Having spent close to 10 years of my career gluing systems together through APIs, I've encountered too many "Oh we have an API!" vendors only to find out how horrible that API is. The consumer facing product is often a direct reflection of the underlying APIs powering it. If you have many APIs powering it, the app will take on all of the negatives of the sum of those APIs. Good app design can help smooth over the rough edges, but that only goes so far.

Again, I should reiterate: I'm not arguing that it can't be done or that it's not possible. I'm arguing that the result will be subpar. Let's remember that the parent discussion is about the creation of a system that rivals the Uber/Lyft experience. If you want to do that, someone (probably someone big like Google as suggested in another comment) is going to have to influence the design of these APIs so the end user experience is a consistent/good one.

So? Then there will be a standard of sorts.

Perhaps so. The point was: scraping/aggregating/etc for car services is not comparable with what sites like Kayak do for the airline industry.

There very well may be one ride hailing app to rule them all, but implementing it will be an entirely different beast.

That's exactly what I predict the market will move to

I agree with the multiple apps and not knowing which ones to use where.

However, as an example, when Uber and Lyft left Austin, one of the companies created locally (RideAustin) to replace the gap does allow payments via Apple Pay. Very convenient, and they also give you the option of rounding up to donate to a charity of your choice.

I guess it's just up to all the other options to realize what people want.

Except... The negative reviews on RideAustin are pretty much all about people having horrible payment-method issues.

Apple Pay is great if you're immersed enough in that ecosystem, but otherwise? Uber and Lyft store CC info, allow for easy deletion, and take PayPal. I'm glad Ride Austin exists, but they still seem to be several laps behind on letting you give them money.

Ah, I was in Austin last year, but ended up renting a car for autonomy. I vaguely remember seeing signs for RideAustin - is that the only app?

Paying the driver directly still sucks. In the US you constantly deal with the "I don't take cards" bullshit and lack of simple feedback for when they take you on a scenic tour.

I would be fine with taxis if I didn't have to interact with the driver at all when it came to payment and could provide feedback right in the app.

>In the US you constantly deal with the "I don't take cards" bullshit

Sounds like a free ride, to me. In my city cabs have to accept credit cards by law. This means if the machine is broken, the cab is unfit for service. If a driver refuses to take a credit card, you don't have to pay them. If they're rude about it, you can call 911, there's a whole division of the PD dedicated to dealing with cabs. The threat of having an officer show up and a possible fine or suspension is probably enough to "fix" their machine.

Personally I prefer a simple feedback system that kicks out bad drivers to confrontation and a need to call 911. Not to mention that there's quite a gap between good service and service that complied with the law. If a driver is rude, swears at me, drives dangerously, what can I do about that? Spend part of my day calling a hackney division that probably doesn't care?

A rating system is actually superior to getting the government involved.

You might be right but I'm js you do have some recourse. You can file a complaint and your leisure. It only takes a couple complaints to trigger a fine.

Not exactly appealing... The last time I went through that, I ended up with a cabbie following me down the street in his car, making threats and watching where I was going, in a town with police response times of 20+ minutes.

A ride experience where I don't have someone threaten me while I call 911 is worth some money to me.

For me the main advantage of using Uber in Europe is payment. It doesn't even matter whether it's card or cash - once I'm at the destination I just want to get out of the car. And having to think about tipping is even worse. And I don't mind paying a fair price.

"I don't take cards" or "It's broken" results in me walking out of the cab. Irregardless of if it's the beginning or end of the trip. All but one time did they change their tune.

In Germany and Budapest, and certainly Sweden, drivers are required by their dispatchers to accept credit cards. "Cash only" drivers will be a thing of the past soon. Look at what happened with the London black cabs: they all accept credit cards these days.

Not everywhere in Germany and even in places where they are required to, for many drivers the card reader is somehow always "broken" when you try to use it. I now use taxi-calling apps with built-in payment as those are really convenient.

This is true in some US markets, not true in others. In NYC it's very easy to pay by CC and requires no interaction with the driver, because they installed CC readers in the back seat of every cab years ago. And if the reader is broken, they're required to tell you before the ride starts.

This is definitely already starting to happen. Uber was banned for a long time here in Madrid which allowed other apps to gain a lot of traction. I'd say the most popular is myTaxi, which allows you to hail the standard local public taxis. I believe it works the same in most major European cities. No need for private taxis.

myTaxi seems to be emerging as a big European one. It's in every major German city (where it started), and also just recently acquired Hailo, which was the dominant London taxi-hailing app.

Ubers other differentiator is the fact that I can go to just about any city in the world and use it. I guess I could research and install fotaxi but as a 21th century consumer, I'm extremely lazy.

I don't think it comes down to just being lazy. Regardless of whether you've had good or bad experiences with Uber, you've had experiences, may have chatted to their support team, etc, and you know what to expect from the service and the company. The local alternative might be better, but it's an unknown.

So are the local restaurants when compared to McDonald's - I guess it all depends on what you want to get out of travel.

For me that's Uber (well, Lyft), but a local restaurant - I don't think it's a fair comparison. Getting somewhere in a cheap and timely way is often an instrumental issue, rather than "part of the travel experience". When it isn't, I'll happily walk, take the subway, etc.

This sort of reminds me of Usain Bolt in Beijing, actually. He lived on McDonald's chicken nuggets, not because he's averse to trying new things but because he couldn't risk anything upsetting his stomach during competition. For him, eating was instrumental, so he wanted predictability.

Even if you immersive travel, there are times when it's really useful to know what you'll get.

I read the GP as saying there'll be a unified UI to various local taxis ("interconnected ecosystem"). I could see this emerging from EU regulation, in a similar way they mandate banks to open up their APIs (which is much bigger than taxis).

I don't know how big that really is. While there are a few business people/tourists that travel a lot, a lot of execs are likely to either take a taxi straight from the airport taxi queue, as it's quite a lot of hassle to use uber at a lot of airports.

The small journeys around town aren't as likely to be as valuable, it's usually the longer airport fares which will make up the majority of taxi spending for people away.

That's why these local taxi companies usually have billboards at train stations and airports that inform travellers of their app.

EDIT: Alternatively, convince the taxi companies to open up their API. Then you can have one app that selects the correct API based on your current location.

> That's why these local taxi companies usually have billboards

What year is this? $YEAR_OF_BILLBOARD_INVENTION + 2?

> Alternatively, convince the taxi companies to open up their API.

I still feel like one company will take over. You cannot build a good product by federating APIs across different municipalities, governments, continents, (planets?).

I don't use a taxi app in Budapest -- the good old phone dispatchers still work just fine and I almost never wait more than 10 minutes for a cab -- but in Berlin I use the "MyTaxi" app all the time[0].

The thing I find interesting is that MyTaxi is loosely coupled with the drivers. There is no obligation to pick up MyTaxi fares, you can go about your business as a cabbie and take MyTaxi fares when business is slow. Seems to work quite well for the drivers.

This morning I had to wait probably 15 minutes before a driver took my MyTaxi order, but considering how bad the phone-dispatch service is in Berlin I call that a win.

Everything else is very Uber-like: electronic receipt, pay in app if you like, tracking of the car on its way to you (more or less).

Oh, and two very neat features: you see your cabbie's full name (this feels safer to me) and you can save them, after rating, to a "favorite drivers" list, which I assume the service will use to help improve customer satisfaction.

[0]: https://de.mytaxi.com/index.html

I had the same in Madrid. Tried to get a taxi for 15 minutes. After that time I had already walked to the next taxi rank and got in the first taxi there. Mytaxi always showed cabs close by but wasn't successful. Wasn't even a busy day, the taxi rank was more than full.

As much as I don't like uber, surge pricing can be a really helpful feature that I would like to have with cabs as well.

Or even just let cab companies compete on price, maybe with some limits. When they could compete on price in Budapest it's true that a lot of tourists got ripped off, but it was awesome if you could afford one of the more expensive companies. Once they introduced uniform pricing the better companies got flooded with calls and availability dropped... and tourists still get ripped off, but probably less often and usually when coming from the airport.

    > cabs being allowed to use the cab lanes
    > (or, in Amsterdam, the bus lanes).

I have not been in an Uber in Amsterdam in the last couple of years that didn't have a full Taxi license (posted in the dashboard) and where the driver was legally permitted to take the bus/tram lanes.

From talking to a few drivers (just asking them about Uber) my understanding is that at some point in Amsterdam Uber was just hiring pretty much anyone with a car as a driver, but then The Netherlands cracked down on it, and now they're all as legit taxi drivers as any other taxi.

So I believe you're posting on the basis of out-of-date information when it comes to Amsterdam.

Uber's decline in Amsterdam will be not only when the local market provides apps of equal caliber, but when they match Uber in prices, it's way cheaper than taking a taxi over here.

>London mirror Uber's functionality

London black cabs have been available by app for a while (Hailo). The main reason people use Uber is that it's about 30% cheaper.

London Black cabs are more expensive than regular taxis because of the huge amount of knowledge those drivers have. The ability to know the city well, along with all road works, detours, construction, and places of interest, is amazing. Even now Google is only approaching this level of knowledge and it still has to improve its interface.

The same almost everywhere, here in Stockholm people used to use Uber when it was about 30% cheaper but nowadays it's been so common to have surge prices that I've not missed uninstalling Uber after the sexist reports came out, sometimes taxis have been cheaper than what friend's Uber app were estimating for a ride.

Common users aren't also aware that Uber is cheaper mostly because of their own subsidies. If this is gone soon feels like it'll only hasten Uber's demise.

If you let the taxi authorities control this you are going to go back to artificial scarcity. That is going to create artificial price hikes.

NYC has the Arro[0] app for yellow cabs, although I haven't ever used it - every other vehicle on the road is a cab.

I suppose it might be useful during shift change?

[0]https://www.goarro.com/

> Uber's only differentiator in well-organised urban markets is its app.

Lower cost is also a factor, relative to local taxis.

Lower cost, at least in Hungary, was artificial, as Uber was able to undercut local fares given its capital.

[edit] replace "turning point" with "catalyst"