How crappy taxi service led to the invention of Uber

Uber might never have happened if an amiable Canadian software designer named Garrett Camp hadn’t pissed off San Francisco’s two biggest taxi companies.

It was the summer of 2008, and Camp, a native of Calgary who’d lived in the Bay Area for all of two years, had become weary of the cat-and-mouse game San Franciscans had grown used to playing with taxi dispatchers.

It was often tough to hail a cab in the city, so most folks called to request a pickup. Camp had the numbers of two cab companies, Yellow and Luxor, stored on his phone.

“Typically you’d call a cab and they’d say it would be there in fifteen to twenty minutes. It was kind of their standard response. But sometimes it would be thirty, or they wouldn’t even show up,” he says.

Worse, he’d see empty cabs roll right by without stopping.

“I think they were dispatching to a particular person and not necessarily the nearest cab, and so sometimes I would get frustrated and I would just get into the nearest one I saw.

Then I’d get a call from the dispatcher saying, ‘Where are you? We’re here.’

And I’d say, ‘I already left because you guys were late.’

That happened enough times that I got blacklisted. For a while neither company would pick up my calls.”

'Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination' by Adam Lashinsky
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MT5IKFJ