alt Hacker News> The reason uber didn't loose that much business is because it replaced the established businesses and left most consumers with little alternative.
The established businesses were awful. There was not a thriving and beloved taxi service in every city pre-Uber. Taxis were bad and very expensive.
Also did you forget that Lyft exists and normal taxis are still available? Taxi services had to improve their business when the ride sharing companies entered the market because they previously relied on their own grip on on-demand transportation to keep prices high and service poor.
Imagine suddenly a new taxi business was able to come into your city and provided taxi rides for 5 cents on the dollar. What would happen?
Edit: now add on top of that that even if uber tried to undercut them again by running losses as they did in the past, that new taxi business would not loose any money if the number of their rides went down because their operating costs simply scale with the number of rides - while uber was loosing money on every ride.