By coincidence, I just did a hackathon in Redwood City this weekend, and on Friday ~11pm I was able to get one at an office park that arrived just after I made it outside from the 2nd floor.
Whatever forces stopped this kind of thing from working before were destroying a lot of value. I know there's always the talk of what cost Uber most be socializing with this service, but even at a 50% fare increase that would have been an extreme improvement over the previous options, so you can't really explain it away as pure cost hiding.
Do you remember if you paid surge pricing? i would guess thats probably the reason. i'm from NYC but am currently in SF. both cities have surge pricing late at night, or when its raining in NYC. taxi regulations artificially depress prices but Uber may have created a fair (?) way of pricing things properly. hence service becomes faster. i'm sure surge pricing creates incentives for more uber drivers to drive at night over time, hopefully it will even out.
Some people don't like the surge - I love it. It means that 100% of the time when I take out my mobile phone, and open up the Uber App, I'm going to get an Uber in a major metropolitan area. I then get to decide for myself whether I'm willing to pay that surge price.
With Taxi's, the decision is taken out of my hands. There are just no taxi's available during rush periods, and I'm left stranded.
Apologies. Normally I catch stuff like that when I read it (but quite often not when I type it) - and it's incredibly frustrating to see. I have an increasing tendency to confuse where/were, there/their, its/it's when I type, and I have to insert a 60 second delay before hitting submit and confirming I haven't blown it. Particularly annoying is the use of 's when it's not needed. Thanks for pointing it out.
Whatever forces stopped this kind of thing from working before were destroying a lot of value. I know there's always the talk of what cost Uber most be socializing with this service, but even at a 50% fare increase that would have been an extreme improvement over the previous options, so you can't really explain it away as pure cost hiding.