Uber loses licence to operate in London, will still operate while appealing

Car hire can work but it's often more expensive, needs to be booked ahead of time and they also refuse trips that aren't profitable for them.

Uber openen up travel for many people in London, especially at night. It's quite easy to find a lot of places in London that aren't serviced by Night Buses, there are plenty of places that are 15-30 min walk from a tube station, and the Night Tube is only available on select lines and only during the weekend.

They're bad in the center too. I live in London bridge / SE1 and black cabs still illegally refuse to take me home from say, Shoreditch because they can't be bothered crossing the river.

So Uber as a service hasn't been that revolutionary in London, the things they HAVE done is improve the ordering UX and making CC's ubiquitous.

I don't know if they still do, but many nightclubs would have some arrangement where there was someone from a minicab company in the lobby or just outside. You'd say "W3", he'd say "That'll be £20, in 10 minutes time" and you could wait in the warm until the car arrived. (Of course, if you knew a number for a different company, you could phone them yourself.)

The drivers were pretty clueless -- even a fairly large inner-London station name like "Ealing Broadway" would frequently be misunderstood, and they'd want to slowly type a postcode into a satnav -- but otherwise they were OK.

Just recently I took a bus at LGA that takes you from the tetminal to the taxi stand due to construction. Even this was easier than getting a Lyft or Uber. I was in the cab way faster (including bus ride) much faster than if I trek to the designated ride hailing pickup areas and negotiate the sea of traffic to find my driver (even in less busy hours).

To boot, the cab trip started further from the airport due to the bus ride, so we were out of airport’s immediate dropoff traffic right away.

Ride was ~$10 cheaper than Lyft as well. The only downside was the annoying TV embedded in the cab. I muted it but could not power off the display.

Usually I just take a taxi from the airport if there isn't a good transit option available. (Or book a car service in advance at my home airport.)

Nobody denies that people like Uber for reasons but what does it even mean for a Taxi system to suck when compared to a super exploitative, unregulated enterprise such as this? As a driver, this is not only about compensation. It's about a critical lack of security in all aspects of your life. And if, as a passenger, you can't really afford decent service and working conditions maybe you are trying to live beyond your means and you should really be boarding a train or bus instead. And if you can't, that, to me, seems like a political problem that shouldn't be solved on the backs of some of the most vulnerable sectors of society.

In London? The suckage level was zero. Black cabs were fine. Reputable minicabs (Addison Lee etc.) were fine. Uber does not provide anything like enough improvement to justify the level of illegality it's riddled with.

However, it seems so many many taxis were frauding their taxes, that it became cultural and enforced.

Which means taxis, which are already known as the top thief job in the world, also steal the citizen on a third level after the ride itself and after choosing the night rate at noon: taxes.

I dare to say Uber, as bad as they can ever be with wages under the legal minimum, can still be a better behaved citizen.

Even in the center good luck hailing one at 2am on a Saturday night.

I’ve been refused rides form the Shard, Bank, and Canary Wharf plto Lancaster gate, both of which are in Zone 1.

If I want to hail a cab from my home I have to walk 10 min to Paddington and I live essentially across from Hyde Park which makes me considerably more central than most people in London.

For my friends who live in Hammersmith, Fulham, Acton and Chiswick they might as well be living in Belgium as far as black cabs are concerned they don’t go there and they won’t take you there.