Hacker News Reader

Comment by cjsuk | Hacker News Reader

Same experience here. Nothing done about a virtual mugging where the cabbie had no idea where he was going, shouted at me and told me I was a cunt because I wasn’t stupid enough to fall for it and pulled him up on it. I rounded his fee down to the nearest £10 and told him to sue me.

I’ve seen black cab drivers shouting “Uber scum” and spitting in the windows of Uber drivers before. This isn’t want I and my wife wanted to experience when you’re getting into an Uber literally after she’s had a hospital appointment and surgery.

I’d rather fucking well walk than get in a black cab.

This whole thing is sad. TfL is a total turd bag as well. Constantly getting overcharged on contactless so I have gone back to prepaid oyster. Customer services tell me I’m a dumbass but several people I know have the same problem on the same routes.

View on HN

> spitting in the windows of Uber drivers before

In South Africa the local metered taxis have gone as far as petrol bombing Uber drivers cars.

https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2017-09-07-wat...

Nothing in South Africa surprises me these days to be honest. I've had too many colleagues from that part of the world :)

This is where prepaid mastercards which sync up to an app on your phone come in really handy.

You get a push notification instantly as soon as a contactless transaction goes through so you know right away if you've been ripped off.

That's not a bad idea actually and the prepaid card actually stays as real money, not "non refundable blue TFL smart card arbitrary number"

In what way are Oyster cards/credit not refundable?

Don't you have to take them to a ticket office?

Only works in some stations and most refuse to deal with it. The there’s the online refund system which is unable to process a refund half of the time.

True, but that does not work for TfL because of how they charge you. Details:

http://news.revolut.com/post/146212645837/touch-it-tap-it-re...

I've been charged a wrong amount by TfL a few times in the past, I contacted them (either on the phone or via the webform) and I was always reimbursed. There are basically two situations where you get charged a wrong amount:

1. common: the "touch out" did not work. Just log in and click "refund previous trip".

2. rare: some weird software exception where your trip is charged via a Zone that you did not travel through.

The second happened to me a few times but honestly if I think of the massive amount of complex/arcane/exceptional software rules they must have ...I feel I cannot blame their software engineers :)

The option (2) happened to me many times in a row. One of the intermediate touch stations that you're supposed to whack at Highbury and Islington when you transition from tube to rail wasn't reporting or not working. This meant I got mugged every day for a week.

Getting the cash out of them proved very difficult.

Sure there are arcane and complex rules but the nature of those demands that the liability is on them.

You didn't get mugged. Please don't downplay muggings. Getting mugged is much worse than paying too much because of a software error. Tfl always reimburses and they pay out to any bank account, you just have to call them for the details. I can understand that it's annoying but that wasn't mugging.

Did you report the faulty purple reader? Those are used by several thousand people per day, I've never seen card readers out of service for more than a day.

Mugging is a colloquial term. Yes I did report the faulty reader. The reader was reading cards and acknowledging them ergo it wasn't faulty and I was charged correctly apparently. Unfortunately this was, to use another colloquial term, bollocks.

No, "mugging" is not a colloquial term for "overcharged" or anything else for that matter.

I’ve lived in London for over 35 years. It’s common parlance. That kebab shop was a mugging. You were mugged in the apple store. Etc etc.

I consulted three dictionaries, including a British one, before writing that comment.

Your use very fringe at best and is very inappropriate anywhere else, as it was pointed out to you.

> Your use very fringe at best and is very inappropriate anywhere else

New Yorker here. Perfectly fine usage there. “The cab driver robbed me” is our local variant.

"Robbed" is not the same as "mugged." You are correct that "robbed" does have a colloquial definition.

>informal overcharge (someone) for something.

If you overpayed you were mugged. Very normal term here in the UK.

Honestly it seems those dictionaries are not at all up to date with common English informal phrases. Source: native and resident Londoner of >40 years, and user of "mugging" in the "ripped off" sense for most of them.

You might find this interesting: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/20477/what-exact...

Dictionaries lag behind the language. They do not define the language. [1] Metaphorically, the dictionary is a slightly out of date road map, it doesn't define the road network. When the poster tells you of a new road, he isn't "wrong" just because it doesn't show up on your old map.

[1] http://www.maximumfun.org/adam-ruins-everything/adam-ruins-e...

Wait. What? In 2017? There are instructions and I have to report broken equipment? I have to figure out instructions on payment system?! There's no button to handle it all on my phone?

Cabs should either operate as well as Uber or die. Instead of figuring out how to become as good or better than Uber they are trying to push Uber out. That just means someone else would show up.

He's talking about the tube, not cab services.

> Wait. What? In 2017? There are instructions and I have to report broken equipment? I have to figure out instructions on payment system?! There's no button to handle it all on my phone?

lol nice bit

wait are you serious

Yes, I am. There's no bloody way I am going to use a dumber system is smarter option is available.

Hope you enjoy being angry all the time over literally pointless minutia

They do in the uk in my experience I call them up tell them where I want to go I get a SMS when they dispatch the cab and another when it arrives.

Only problem is during the school run time as many parents don't want "Oliver" or "Lucinda" to slum it with the poor kids on the school bus

Not in my experience, the cab is always "just round the corner" when it's 10 minutes late and I ring to chase it up. Another 15 minutes and maybe it arrives, or maybe I ring again and "oh we had to cancel it".

When uber is available it's a glorious system - know exactly where the cab is, which one it is (when it's busy and there are many outside), no "I don't go south of the river" type drivers, takes credit card (no "the machine is broken" at the end of the trip, or try to flag down a black cab that does take card), always get a receipt, not a scrap of paper you have to fill yourself, etc etc.

The only problem is it's not available in the town I live in. The local mini cab firms usually refuse to take bookings for short trips (2 miles), and usually refuse them even when you want one asap

Phoning for a cab is 1980s technology. I've used uber in a dozen countries on 4 continents, the same experience every time, far better than any mini cab or taxi (in NYC taxis force adverts down your throat!)

That's quite interesting. Option 1 has happened to me a few times with an Oyster card, and I've always had issues claiming refunds, receiving this message: "We have been unable to process your refund application, This is due to a technical error."

Since switching to using my Monzo card, I've had this issue one time and received the refund no problems. Not sure if that's coincidental.

Ah yes I got a similar error.

I designed the original tariffing engine for Oyster back in 2003/4. Compared to similar work I did for cellphone operators this was interesting in that Oyster actively seek to charge the lowest amount possible. The engine is pretty simple in that it does a shortest-path (£-based) determination between start and end stations. The trick was dealing with trips where a weekly or monthly travel card covers part of the route, and pay-as-you-go the rest. There are other edge cases that cannot be handled at all - having a travel card for, say, a trip through zones 1 and 2, and a pre-purchased ticket for zones 3 and 4 for a trip from zone 2 to 4.

Where can i get that in the UK?

Monzo, Monese and Revolut all offer this.

No banks I'll have heard of, then? Do you use one you'd recommend?

I've used 2 out of 3 of those, they all work as expected and work with same day deposits

I use Monzo, and would highly recommend them. Great customer support, very transparent (you can see their trello roadmap, they interact with the community via forums and Slack) and I love their product too (have switched over to their current account as primary bank account now). They have somre really great people working there too - if you're in London they have a lot of events and talks that are pretty interesting.

I and a lot of my friends use Revolut and it's excellent. They're a very well funded FinTech startup and have been around for a few years.

I use Monzo and Starling. I'm very happy with both of these and prefer them to my old bank (Halifax).

I've been a happy Monzo user for at least a year, but recently got a Starling account because they have Android Pay and Monzo don't.

However, if you use a credit card like amex, you always have the option of resolving it with them should tfl fail.

On the other hand, my cab driver left with my girlfriend's phone and never returned it back. Uber completely ignored us.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com