It could well boil down to just snorting VC cash and enjoying the ride; but I assume that there’s at least some delta between what it costs to get someone behind the wheel in an urban area dense enough to have plenty of taxi customers and what a homebound worker in some really depressed location will run you.
Depending on how tight the latency requirements are it wouldn’t be entirely surprising to discover that service is, mysteriously, offered in cities with acceptable ping times to parts of Mexico or the Caribbean; but not so much on the northern border.
