It's precisely how it worked everywhere I've lived. What you describe sounds like a low density suburb or smaller town. Yeah, social pressure in those situations still works.
The only time I've seen things work as you describe were small/vacation towns when I was visiting for a wedding or whatnot. The type of places where there are a dozen total cabs for the entire county.
Any major (call it NFL tier) city scheduling a pickup was a laughable joke. You quickly learn when you move to such places the first time you schedule a cab how totally unreliable it is.
Even the overly chatty cabbies would be happy to tell you how much of a scam it was, and go on to describe how every driver but them does X, Y, and Z to avoid taking such calls. This is the sole reason Uber got its foothold in my household.
> It's precisely how it worked everywhere I've lived.
Have you lived in NYC? It's not how it worked here prior to Uber. You could call one of the car services and schedule a pickup ahead of time and they'd show up. Of course it wasn't totally necessary, because you could call Northside or Arecibo at 4am and they'd come pick you up at your house within 5 minutes.
Outside of NYC, yeah it was a mess. I remember being at datacenters in New Jersey in the middle of the night to fix some server that went down when I was at the beginning of my career and you'd have to call a bunch of car services to find anyone working at 4am.
It's precisely how it worked everywhere I've lived. What you describe sounds like a low density suburb or smaller town. Yeah, social pressure in those situations still works.
The only time I've seen things work as you describe were small/vacation towns when I was visiting for a wedding or whatnot. The type of places where there are a dozen total cabs for the entire county.
Any major (call it NFL tier) city scheduling a pickup was a laughable joke. You quickly learn when you move to such places the first time you schedule a cab how totally unreliable it is.
Even the overly chatty cabbies would be happy to tell you how much of a scam it was, and go on to describe how every driver but them does X, Y, and Z to avoid taking such calls. This is the sole reason Uber got its foothold in my household.