Comment by joe_the_user
2 years ago
When I drove taxi in the mid-2000s, payment was essentially always cash. The taxi companies were small operations that basically leveraged their connections to city government to get their positions. They resisted all modernizations because they cost money and because their monopoly guarantee them money from passengers no matter how shitty the service - and it was the drivers who made tip-money or not from service quality.
So basically Uber, not general progress, was what changed things to electronic payments etc.
Electronic payment is just a part of the improvements ushered in by Uber, there's also calling to location and driver reviews. Those are important too.
> there's also calling to location
Before any wise guys come in here and claim that you could order cabs to a location by phone before uber, I would like to point out that they frequently failed to arrive and you had no way of knowing whether or not they would arrive until you gave up waiting for them, so while you could theoretically do this is was terribly unreliable and often a big mistake.