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Comment by ixtli | Hacker News Reader

Before you get all excited about this, it's ONLY UberPOOL and your destination must start and end in Manhattan. So if you use this to commute for two weeks you're paying 10 (edit: obviously 100/20 = 5, it's early. leave me alone) dollars flat for a cab ride that you share and will take longer than normal because of the overhead of splitting the ride.

There are certainly some people for whom this will be cost effective, especially if they spend most of their day traveling to places they can be 5-10 minutes +/- their target arrival. However for people like me who live on the east side of Manhattan and commute to FiDi it doesn't actually save a worthwhile amount of money.

Also forbes is incredibly spammy so here's the link directly to the promo: https://www.uber.com/info/plus/newyork/

View on HN

Also, uberpool is terrible. Can easily make a 20 minute ride 60 minutes depending on how many other fares they pick up/drop off on the way.

I took one into the city once to try it out. Normally a 20 minute drive, we stopped and picked up 2 other fares. They both got dropped off before me (which is insane), and it ended up taking over an hour.

The worst part? The drive told me that if we dropped off one and another came up, he'd have to pick that up too before dropping me off.

Yeah I had the exact same happen to me, really annoying. I understand they're just doing their job, so i can't really have a go at them for it either.

I would rather pay the extra for UberX now (or whatever it is called) instead of UberPool

Been very good in my experience for going from San Francisco -> East Bay.

yeah been great for me in sf as well but kind of shitty in seattle. wonder why.

This is the core of why everyone argues about Uber online. In some cities it's fantastic. In others it's terrible.

I have used uber and lyft in many cities and been satisfied. Never once in NYC. I probably just have bad luck, but honestly in manhattan it's the same price to get a cab even at 3am and doesn't require an app or surge pricing. I've heard the same anecdotes from friends. The notable exception is going to or from other burrows. It's often cheaper to get a car from a service if there's no surge, though the green cabs are starting to compete when traveling from somewhere outside manhattan.

In general transit problems (and thus solutions) don't translate from other cities to New York or vice versa.

What was the price compared to a cab, though? $10 vs $30?

You forgot that people commute 2 ways in your math, so 2 weeks of commutes would be 20 trips coming out to $5/trip, not 10.

This is compared to ~$2.50 a trip on the subway, which (depending on which line you're near and whether you have a transfer) could take substantially less time than a car ride.

There are however some "subway deserts" -- the upper-east and lower-east sides come to mind -- whose residences would greatly benefit from skipping two long walks a day.

For people who are intolerant of heat and odor like me, avoiding overcrowded and AC-less stations in the summer alone is worth the $2.50.

This is a great point! Too bad they ran this promo right _after_ it stopped being 100+ degrees on the 4,5,6 platform at union square or I might have done it just for this reason o_o

Personnaly it's at least three trips, work, going out and home and sometimes more on the weekend so this is pretty amazing actually.

It's much more comfortable than taking subways (which is also 100$ a month)

$116.50, +1 for a new metrocard Uber beats subway by $16.50; or three and a bit uberpools/month

But there is the whole: subway = nuclear power = low carbon footprint vs uber = dead dinosaurs.

And the whole exploiting people who don't understand the math of their business and are actually losing money / putting themselves into life altering IRS debt thing...

Many large companies in manhattan participate in pretax programs that allow people (myself included) to get a monthly metro card for ~60 dollars. So yeah these types of programs will never compete with that.

Does the NYC Subway really run on nuclear power? I had no idea, but that is cool.

Probably half nuclear: http://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=NY#tabs-4

The rest is mostly natural gas, and virtually no coal. I'm jealous! (Here in Virginia, it's about one third each of coal, gas, and nuclear.)

Isn't Virginia a huge coal-mining state? I'm surprised nuclear is that high of a percentage.

I recall visiting a coal-mining museum in some state that had a big coal industry, and it was amazing how optimistic and pro-coal the whole thing was. (Note that I said "amazing", not "surprising".)

There's some here, but most of the coal mining activity is further west. West Virginia is the biggest coal state on the east coast and second biggest in the US. Nice map here:

http://www.virginiaplaces.org/geology/coal.html

It looks like their electricity is absolutely dominated by coal.

Even though not much in mined in state, we're close enough to WV and others that it seems like it would still be the obvious source here. I'm not sure why it's not, although I'm glad!

Lots of power in NYC is nuclear, but not all. At least some proportion of electrons in that third rail will have be excited by nuclear heat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_New_...

The math here is wrong. Uber is offering two weeks for $100, not one month.

There's also the whole: subway = not air conditioned and miserable, uber = air conditioned and comfortable. Also, as a Hudson Valley resident for most of my life, Indian Point and nuclear power in general is a huge concern for me.

When I was in New York this summer I carried around a sweater because it was too cold in the subway. It was 30-33°C outside most of the time (the Google machine tells me that's 86-91°F). It's true that the subway stations were miserably hot, though. (I'm European, but you can probably tell from my complaining about American air conditioning)

I'd assume I'm getting downvoted because I made a comment about my trepidation towards nuclear power.. If you lived within an emergency evacuation zone for a nuclear plant you may feel the same (disclaimer: I don't, but I lived close enough to Indian Point to feel unsafe, and everytime I take Metro North and see it fly past my window, I think what a risk it is)...

Indian Point is a liability to the people and the ecosystems of the lower Hudson Valley. New York State / Cuomo recently denied Entergy's certificate to continue using the Hudson River (1), which they are battling in court. Terrorism risks aside, this is not a state of the art nuclear plant. It's over 40 years old, the bolts are (literally) starting to break (2), and there was a recent radioactive leak (3) into the HUDSON RIVER. How can this not be worrying? It's been shown that NY can maintain energy levels at a cost of 20-30% higher without nuclear power (4), a number I hope will decrease as NY improves wind and solar (mind you, this report is from the Manhattan Institute, a think tank that vehemently supports fracking). This comes down to an increase of $76–$112 per residential customer. Personally, I'd be willing to pay twice that if it meant shutting down IP.

1. http://www.riverkeeper.org/news-events/news/stop-polluters/p... 2. http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/ops-experience/baffle-... 3. http://www.lohud.com/story/news/local/indian-point/2016/02/0... 4. https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/economic-impacts-cl...

You may also be getting downvoted because the subway system is air conditioned.

Most lines have working AC. But I bet that anyone (myself included) that complains about the NYC subway being hot is most likely referring to the 10-15 minutes of hell standing on a subway platform in absolute delirium-inducing 95 degree, 100% humidity, Gotham city fresh air.

Refuse to read Forbes due to their aggressive stance against AdBlockers

I'm not sure they have a problem with that... They save the page serving cost and they weren't going to get revenue for it anyways.

if you go both ways, it's $5

> So if you use this to commute for two weeks you're paying 10 dollars flat for a cab ride that you share and will take longer than normal because of the overhead of splitting the ride.

So, you take a ride to work and then you teleport back to your origin?

Hah. yes fixed.

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