[alteriority]

Agreed. I think the natural level will regress to something in the middle--the price was artificially high before from exorbitant taxi medallion prices and protectionist laws, and now it's artificially low from an influx of VC cash.

One thing of note: I lived in a semi-rural college town in the USA, with very few uber drivers but a fairly active "beeper" group organized on facebook--born of a designated driver system that expanded into general use--where people would manually post that they were available to drive or needed a driver.

The infrastructure wasn't very good, and there's no real reputation system aside from word of mouth, but it stands as a proof of concept. In theory, now that the idea's in the air, just about anyone could just slap a front-end on a routing system and cut Uber's take out entirely, as long as they're willing to deal with the responsibility (or absence) of things like payment processing and liability for things that transpire on their system.