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Comment by chii | Hacker News Reader

> Many buildings are hostile to use of Uber in my daily experience.

if there's already a taxi rank, then uber should be using that space to pick-up/drop-off. If there isn't, then the current building is _already_ unfriendly to taxis.

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Yes, they are already unfriendly to taxis. In Orlando and many other places we didn’t use taxis as much as we use Uber now. When we get to fully autonomous vehicles this will be an even greater problem as it will not make sense to park the car. Real estate investors should be planning for that now in the buildings they are designing that will still be standing in 30 years.

Except taxi ranks are a queue of fungible vehicles; uber/lyft's are "bespoke" so the exact same structure won't work quite as well.

But it wouldn't be hard to make a pickup/dropoff area. I suspect there already is one at most places, it's just a pissy, petty policy that doesn't allow ridesharing (etc) to use it.

It’s more than policy. It is architecture. As I described above, I live in a new building. I step out into traffic to get into an Uber. This was an obvious thing to consider during this building’s design.

In SF planning meetings, I have seen buildings explicitly discouraged from accommodating pickup/dropoff on the theory that it would make traffic impacts worse (this is backwards) and undermine the “transit oriented” argument (harder to argue).

There's no reason why rideshare queues and car-rider assignments couldn't be fungible up to the point the passenger steps into the vehicle, special needs excepted.

Those are called taxis. Even then they only line up at major locations, not residential buildings.

No.

Rideshare still behaes ona requ basis. But the vehicle at the head of the queue serves the passenger first requesting a ride, special needs excepted. Out-of-order arrival of rides is addressed that way.

That means the rider wouldn't know what vehicle is coming and when, which goes against the whole experience.

Also it's unlikely for there to be that many rides queued up at a single residential location which is why they aren't queued up there in the first place.

it's unlikely for there to be that many rides queued up at a single residential location

The premise of this thread was that there were.

I think it's about having a pickup/dropoff area, not necessarily a queuing system, especially because ridesharing does not use traditional waiting queues.

Again, specifically not the case here. You are having a different discussion.

"if there's already a taxi rank, then uber should be using that space to pick-up/drop-off. If there isn't, then the current building is already unfriendly to taxis."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19596930

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