Just curious, have you ever actually taken many cabs in cities? Or Ubers?

I see this complaint all the time and I truly can't wrap my mind around it based on my own experience. The difference between yellow cabs and Ubers is night and day. I've had countless cabs drive away and refuse to pick me up because they didn't like where I was going, and that's never once happened with Uber (I'm sure it happens some behind the scenes but once I get matched with a driver it's very reliable).

There's even an entire industry in NYC of "gypsy cabs" in some of the outer boroughs, because the limited number of medallioned yellow cabs never go out there since it's not profitable enough.

I've nearly missed flights twice because of uber drivers canceling on me - 10-15 min after accepting the ride In Columbus, Ohio and Panama. If you've ever tried to get taxis in Panama you know they're worse though.

If I'm going to take uber to the airport, I'm careful now to leave an extra 30 min over the two hours I would normally plan for.

I got off a bus once, at night, by mistake, in what seemed like a very bad part of town. I was waiting for the next bus to carry me away but became uncomfortable with my surroundings and so tried to get an Uber to come first. I had four or five cancel on me immediately after getting assigned and wound up having to wait for the bus anyway. I've never experienced that before or since with Uber.

Uber doesn't punish drivers for cancelling anymore because it kept being used as an argument that drivers are employees, not contractors.

Taxi's do the same thing. Wouldn't come to the location I was in, hung up, told us we were in a bad neighborhood and shouldn't be there. Eventually the bus came, we didn't want to wait 60 minutes with luggage.

back few years ago, entering the destination was optional, and I had people cancel on me after knowing the destination.

now it doesn't make sense because they know where you're going before they accept.

some have told me that if they reject too many rides the algorithm punishes them.

It's a convenient narrative, but if you ever tried getting a cab in the Sunset in 2005 you'd know that at least in some places Uber dramatically improved the ability to get equal opportunity transportation.

I’ve had way more yellowcabs in nyc refuse to take me to the airport than ubers/lyfts.

Uber certainly disrupted that industry. I would never get into a cab unless I absolutely had to. Now I'm not getting a new car once my lease is up because I uber everywhere I go.

While you have the right idea, the problem is that taxi laws are not enforced enough to deter ride-discrimination behavior. Plenty of times before Uber/Lyft I had cab drivers refuse a ride because they didn't want to drive outside of the city at the most lucrative hour, or they'd just refuse to stop.

Yep, I was talking about Uber/Lyft et al with someone recently and going over the point that these services are finding out that Taxi services charge what they charge and operate how they operate due to very good reasons on the whole.

There's a lot of institutional knowledge baked into the cab industry and Uber/Lyft thought they could figuratively reimplement the whole deal in a weekend.