I live in Pittsburgh and the situation isn't much better. Taxi service effectively doesn't exist here. One newspaper wrote a "review" of sorts of Pittsburgh Yellow Cab and found that, for the most part, they wouldn't take you anywhere put the airport. The author would call them, ask for a ride to the airport, get a cab at his door
immediately, then change his destination once he got in the car. They made him get out of the car every time.
Everyone I know who lived here before Uber/Lyft has a story about going out to the bars, calling a taxi, waiting two hours for it to come, and ending up walking two more hours home because the taxi never arrived. And I'm sure many more people have had the same experience and simple chosen to drive drunk. It's quite literally a publicly safety issue. Luckily Uber and Lyft came along two years ago and are now operating legally.
The #1 thing we've all learned from this debacle is that many, many cab companies are the scum of the earth. To be fair, though, some are still good. In Chicago, for example, you can hail a cab without even trying. You can go to the bathroom and find a cab waiting for you in the toilet. They are everywhere, they are reasonably priced, and they know the city a hell of a lot better than most Uber drivers. They continue to thrive because they are full time professionals who provide a better service than Uber and Lyft. That's a lesson the drivers in Paris and Pittsburgh need to learn.