How small a town are we talking about? I grew up in a 100,000 person city and we only had two taxi services that would take ages to arrive, depending on where you were.

It must depend on the demographics also, right? Which would apply some skew to our personal impressions, making it hard to say much.

I’ve lived in a couple college towns and they tended to have smaller populations, but pretty good taxi services—which makes sense when you have a bunch of young people who want to go out to drink, might not have cars, and probably are willing to spend money on that sort of thing, and tend to all go to and from the same destinations.

I bet the hackernews demographic skews toward college educated, so I wonder if people are commenting with truthful experiences, but from that particular (IMO, at least questionably representative) niche.

Around 100k. It was in Russia though and owning a car wasn't as common as say in US. Public transport wasn't very pleasant to use either.

It was an interesting case, a sort of a breakthrough in transportation habits achieved by loads of 15-years old right-hand-drive Toyotas converted into taxis. The cheapest ride was around $1 and people literally started riding taxis to the next building on the same street.

A population of 100k is large enough to appear on the wikipedia list of "largest cities in Russia". A small town it is not.

When I say a very small town I mean way less than 100k people. There is a very high barrier to entry in being the second taxi service for outsiders because when it's that small everyone knows everyone else or their family by name so they don't trust outsiders easily.

Regardless of how permissive the regulations and bylaws are on the books.

And even when it's a second group of locals that want to establish a second taxi service, you can still establish your 'monopoly power' on one side of town, or specific areas. There's no practical bottom limit.