Of course you can. I've had two jobs where a cab was part of the commute - one short term (2 months) but daily in Chicago, and I scheduled the cab two hours before I needed it and it would wait at the train station for me, and the other only on Sunday mornings at 5am in Baltimore, and I would schedule it the night before.
It was neither difficult nor traumatic as the descriptions of the "problem" that Uber is solving that I see in these Uber threads. I've never driven a car in my 40 years of life, and therefore taken 1000 cabs in a dozen cities, but I've clearly only taken the best ones.
Baltimore. Good one. Baltimore's cab dispatch system is what prompted me to install Uber and Lyft on my phone. Asking for a pickup two hours from now lead me to get a blaring horn (no doubt waking up my hotel neighbors) 30 minutes later. Asking for a taxi as soon as possible left me waiting for over an hour. One time, the taxi service shamelessly said the drivers changed their mind and wouldn't get me from Amtrak at all.
Maybe things have changed since the introduction of these ride sharing apps, but reliability of the Baltimore taxi system used to be atrocious outside of the 5 block radius of the Inner Harbor.
If you had said "black car service," I would have believed your story could be representative, but that is simply incongruent with every experience I've had in Baltimore. I tried the 3 major cab companies in Baltimore and had similar experiences with each.
I'm not alleging any moral shortcoming, it's just that there was no incentive to improve service to an acceptable level until Uber and Lyft arrived.
It was neither difficult nor traumatic as the descriptions of the "problem" that Uber is solving that I see in these Uber threads. I've never driven a car in my 40 years of life, and therefore taken 1000 cabs in a dozen cities, but I've clearly only taken the best ones.