&gt;Most of the benefit of Lyft&#x2F;Uber comes from app convenience, being cashless, mutual rating to weed out the jerks, carpooling efficiency, transparency (easy to get estimates and know if you overpaid), good customer support, and reliability in getting a ride, all of which are legal and which cab companies could have done.<p>You are ignoring the speed of getting a ride.   I mean, all those things would help a lot for cabs, but if I had to wait half an hour, even if I knew it would only be half an hour, while that would be better than my previous cab experience, it still wouldn&#x27;t be very useful.<p>If you want me to use the cab regularly, your average wait time needs to be 5 minutes or less.   This means you need a lot of cabs on the road... a lot more than were in my area before this.<p>I&#x27;ll put up with a lot of other bullshit, but if you make me wait, I&#x27;m not going to use your service, full stop.<p>I&#x27;m not sure that would be possible under the previous regulations.  Improving dispatch only takes you so far; at some point you need more cabs on the road.<p>&gt;They have a lot of room to raise prices before it outweighs those advantages. Remember, people were using UberBlack (as &quot;UberCab&quot; way back then), which simply took existing, fully-insured car service drivers, which had no regulatory advantage, long before UberX&#x2F;Lyft.<p>Now, here&#x27;s where we need to stop and remember that the average HN user makes a lot more money than the average person.   Yes, for you and me?  it&#x27;s about convenience.<p>That&#x27;s the thing, I&#x27;d be fine paying uber black rates;  but waiting is not a luxury experience.   At the same price, I&#x27;d much rather ride in a ratty honda that shows up in four minutes than take a limo that takes twenty minutes.<p>But there are a lot of people for whom the price matters a whole lot. There are more of them than there are of us, by a lot.    If Uber only wants to keep me as a customer, yes, they can double prices for me.   but their customer base is massively larger if they are cheaper than cabs, and the larger their customer base, the more cars they will have wandering around, and the less time I need to wait for a car.<p>I suspect that if uber doubled their prices, their ridership (and thus drivers on the road) would fall to the point where my wait times would increase to the point where I would no longer find the service interesting.