My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford
whatever.scalzi.com
whatever.scalzi.com
Better to ask forgiveness than permission.
"This fee of $10 will be applied if you return your car to a different location from that which was scheduled, or if you return more than 12 hours after the date and time previously scheduled, and you notify us of an extension of your rental by the return date and time previously scheduled by calling 1-800-654-4174.
If you do not notify us of such a change, the Late Return Fee of $12 per day, (maximum of 5 days) will apply."
Which is what will happen here. They'll charge you this fee, but also adjust the base rental charges to much higher rates that reflect the fleet management burden caused by one-way rentals.
In practice, the cost usually turns into around $0.37/mile, plus the daily rate, unless you have a corporate discount.
(Though I do wonder if "Hi, I'm a photographer and I lent my camera on the internet" and "Hi, I'm with the loss department of a major national rental car company" get you different responses from the police for reasons entirely unrelated to the legal status of the misdeed.)
My (very limited and probably outdated) understanding of the rental car industry is that the locations are franchises and the cars are owned by the franchise. If you rent a car round trip and leave it in some other city they have to deal with getting it back.
You shouldn't project your obliviousness on everyone else.
Vancouver, WA is a suburb of and part of the greater Portland area. Also referred to as the Portland / Vancouver metropolitan area.
It's completely understandable that the "flunkie" at the counter assumed someone leaving from the largest city in Washington would be be referring to the 4th largest city in Washington (Vancouver).
Sounds like the big fee was well deserved.
// Except it's not, they're filmed in the Canadian Vancouver anyway.
I will concede that some people in Portland call it "Vantucky" because it's trended more conservative.
Even if the author could rent a car, having to drive 300 miles is astounding waste of time and mental energy.
In Wisconsin’s case it was about $800MM with no local match needed and the catch was committing to running the service for 20 years.
Even as someone who wasn’t a big fan of the project I’m still annoyed because we’ve now spent significantly more than 20 years of operating costs for work that would have been paid for if we took the money.
You probably wouldn't get the high-speed rail to Bradford OH directly though. The closest you'd get is Dayton OH, but thankfully that's a more doable 30+ mile Lyft ride.
* plane travel is too much of a hassle for such a short trip, and usually expensive
* roads (bus & car) are too congested
Induced demand is a thing.
... and that's not my argument. But lowered real costs -- not merely price, but time, convenience, flexibility, time-sharing (work/eat/sleep in transit), predictability, safety, baggage allownce, efficiency gains, and more -- should increase effective utility and utilisation.
The biggest pitfalls of rail have been right-of-way acquisition in mature economic regimes (high induced land values, themselves a result in large part of improved transport, impede further transport development), transfers and mode-transitions (especially rail-to-local endpoint travel), and technological lock-in and stagnation.
China has the benefits of late adoption, relatively low economic development, and critically, a regime of weak real (land) property rights. All enable it to adopt recent and advanced technologies, and to plan and acquire rights of way at low cost.
Even in parts of the United States where China's other, and more usually noted advantage, exceedingly high population density, is more closely matched, the US is hugely hampered by built rail infrastructure and extant technologies, high land values, and an increasingly oppressive private land ownership tradition.
Rail is more expensive than roads in the US even where the right of way already exists. The Silver Line was built along an existing right of way and still cost $250 million per mile. (There is tons of excess freeway median in the US that could cost rail.) The problem is actually the high cost of skilled labor in the US. I don’t suppose you’d consider US labor rights to be “oppressive.”
(See subsequent parallel response.)
Oh but it does.
Citations requested.
DC Metro's Silver Line is 29.6 miles long, has 26 stations, and cost $6.8 billion, or $229 million/mi, roughly one tenth the cost of Boston's freeway project.
Peak capacity at 26 8-car trains of 120 passenger earch per hour is just under 25,000 passengers/hr. Over nearly 30 miles. Or roughly 750,000 passenger miles per hour, as compared with 70,000 passenger-miles/hr sustained for the Gig Dig.
Note that, yes, I'm comparing Metro peak with Boston daily average. The >10x advantage remains. "More than 70% of rail ridership occurs during the morning and evening rush hours, and 43% of these commuters ride Metro in a one-hour time period' (WMATA Core Capacity study).
This gives us about 3,200 passenger-mile/$billion for urban highway, versus 110,000 passenger-mile/$billion for DC Metro.
Metro wins handily. Rail is 34x more cost effective than highway.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2015/12/29/years-later-...
https://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1219/p02s01-ussc.html
https://nhts.ornl.gov/tables09/fatcat/2009/avo_TRPTRANS_WHYT...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Line_(Washington_Metro)
https://web.archive.org/web/20101203024521/http://wmata.com/...
A better point of comparison to the Silver Line is the inter-county connector in MD. Both built in the 2010s. $127 million per mile, which includes land acquisition costs because it wasn’t built along an existing right of way like the Silver Line.
You’re also completely off on the ridership side. Because rail only takes you on inflexible routes, actual ridership is low except in dense downtown cores. The Silver Line operates nowhere near capacity. Silver Line ridership is under 17,000 passengers per day. The inter county connector averages 30-40,000. So more than double the ridership for half the per mile cost.
I don’t see how you go from that to a comparison against literally the most expensive road tunnel in US history, especially given that the whole point of the silver line example is that it runs through the exurbs on an existing freeway median.
I'm not intimately familiar with the project (and had to ask you which specifically you'd meant), and you failed to adequately develop your argument between sly ad homs.
I'm proposing that land aquisition, as a net factor -- fighting NIMBY battles, as an example, would be a component -- is one of at least three factors disadvantaging rail vs highway construction in the US.
And yet despite this, your own cherry-picked example comes out far ahead, even allowing for what I'd noted were rough and likely advantageous numbers, than a contemporaneous urban highway project. You've not presented much by way of numbers or cites yourself.
If you don't mind a personal observation: you come across, repeatedly and not only with me, as so bent on burying your counterparties that you constantly shift burdens of proof, fail to construct or support your arguments sufficiently, or care to accidentally learn anything along the way. I honestly didn'y know how the Silver vs. Dig comparison would turn out. I simply followed the maths to their conclusion.
I don't understand what you're trying to say here. It looks like you want to draw a comparison between carrying capacity for a road and carrying capacity for a railroad. OK.
What does "the >10x advantage remains" mean? Remains after making what adjustment? The quote you provide immediately after that sentence severely undermines your implicit claim that rail is efficient by pointing out that, although the Silver Line's capacity is high, that capacity is worthless because almost all of it goes unused.
Also, you're not doing the passenger-miles-per-hour math correctly. To get maximum possible passenger-miles-per-hour, multiply 25,000 passengers by the average speed of the trains, yielding an answer in units of passenger-miles-per-hour. You multiplied 25,000 passengers by 30 miles, yielding 750,000 passenger-miles (not per-hour). (As it happens, the average speed is 33 mph, so you slightly underestimated peak capacity... except that, of course, peak capacity in reality is much, much lower, unless you'd like to force people onto the Metro.)
Rayiner had tossed out the example of DC's Silver Line, though without bothering to state just what his argument was. I pulled Boston's BD project and ran with what numbers I could find (surprisigly scarce) to try to come up with some kind of metric for comparing total ridership capacity provided. Utility in daily trips served matters far more than cost-per-mile. And I hazily recollect that short-headway rail (DC Metro manages ... 6 minutes, by one statement, 26 trains/hr, or 2 minute headways (possibly bidirectional?) by another) does far better than a controlled-access highway.
My interest in doing unpaid, unreciprocated consulting for rayiner, esq., is rapidly diminishing, so I left off with some hazy numbers, but at least signalled that they are in fact hazy.
A USDoT source gives a maximum capacity of 2300 vph for a highway in good weather at 65mph.
https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/fhwahop13042/appd.htm
And another sorce provided a 1.55 passengers/car loading factor, US average.
The WMATA source given earlier gives 26 trains/hr, 6 cars/train (actual in service, 8 cars possible), and 120 passengers/car (162% of seated load) as maximum capacity.
Multiplication gives 18,720 passengers/hr peak throughput, a bit over 12,000 passenger vehicles, or 5.25 lanes of highway capacity. I'd counted mileage to account for the difference in project lengths: Silver == 30 miles, Big Dig less than two. Point being that the spend of the two projects delivers very different total travel utility.
WMATA's Estimated average daily ridership, all lines, 2020: 1 million. Better than the Big Dig total.
As for rail and efficiency: unlike highways, rail (through traffic coordination and limiteds) can achieve both higher throughput and shorter trip times (balanced by less frequent service to a given destination) than highways. Trip times are overall more predictable. Safety and other factors, to both users and pedestrians, tends to be better than highways also.
Further factor are that rail service (which may or may not be bundled in project costs) includes rolling stock and maintenance facilities, as well as fuel/power, and maintenance, all provided by users of highways. Rolling stock lifetimes are generally measured in decades vs. years for autos.
Get to the airport, takes about 1 hour (drive 60k or 40 miles). If you don’t have a car - even longer.
You arrive in advance, security, luggage check in then boarding, then runway.
It’s been around 3 hours so far.
Now you fly for 50 to 70 minutes and it doesn’t include the plane driving through airport after landing.
Get off, grab you luggage - another 40 minutes easily. 15 if you’re lucky.
Now you need to get to the city, so it is 2 hours by car through Moscow traffic or 1 hour using “aero express” train.
The thing is, once you get off this “aero express” train, chances are it is still about one hour trip on subway to the office/apartment.
I used to fly like that, I was leaving my parents apartment at about 4-30am to arrive by 10/11am.
Compare it to train - it takes 13 hours but it leaves from the city centre, no security check in’s no nothing, you take 30 minutes to arrive there. It leaves at 6-30pm, you have supper and sleep. 7-30am BOOM you’re in the center of Moscow right next to subway station. Brush you’re teeth during approach, have your breakfast and off you pop.
It feels muuuuch better on the train. Air travel overhead is just too big - 5 hours or something for hour of the flight time. With train you have about two hours of overhead.
The only thing it is almost twice as expensive compared to air travel
> Chris Jackson, the editor-in-chief of Railway Gazette International, based in London, said JR East wanted to raise their maximum train speed to 224 miles per hour to achieve a journey time between Tokyo to Sapporo that rivals flying.
> Currently, the world’s fastest trains in regular service run between Beijing and Shanghai, in China, at speeds up to 217 miles an hour, he said.
Sapporo is over 500 miles from Tokyo, and the trains might be faster than a 600mph plane ride...
When I was in Hokkaido the opening of the track was rumoured for about 2030. (usual disclaimer, you got it from a guy on the internet, etc)
Also, the trip through the Seikan tunnel (the 33.46 miles undersea tunnel connecting Honshu with Hokkaido) enforces relatively slow speeds, since it's shared with other, slower trains. They would probably have to implement significant extensions that it could be approached with Shinkansen speed.
That said, the train trip between Hakodate and Sapporo is a rather nice one. Aided by a Bento box and a couple of Asahis it's a pleasurable experience. Even if you don't have the over-the-top Shinkansen luxury and speed.
On the minus side I had to stay a night in Hakodate, because appart from the first two trains to Tokyo there was no seat available on any other train. No matter in which class, alas, that was the Sunday, which marked the end of golden week.
Hakodate, while certainly not what you expect of magic Japan, has its attractions in its own rights. Especially when you arrive during the end days of the cherry blossom and there's that really great sushi place, which was a lot cheaper than anything comparable in Tokyo.
I digress, most definitely, but - ahh - I really want to go back to Japan.
Well you also have to commute to train stations.
True enough.
I live almost equidistantly from three international airports, all, nominally (that is without traffic) about 75 minutes drive away.
The closest main train station is a 15 minute bike ride away or a 10 minute drive away (without traffic). Funnily enough the local train station is slightly further away both by car and bike.
Sure, not every country (notably the US) offers such privileged amenities, but where a good train network is available trips up to six hours are definitely doable, if not preferable.
I can be at my local airport (Baltimore) in less than 30 minutes, and be seated in another 30 minutes if I’m traveling early. If I lived in real America, somewhere like Kansas City or Buffalo, it’d take like 15-20 minutes to get from parking to the airplane.
Even still, the city population was about 880K in 2018, with a metro area of 2.4MM. So even in a US city with a somewhat aggressive annexation policy, still only about ⅓ of the population lives within the city limits. And Columbus has no passenger trains, anyway, neither intracity nor intercity.
a 2 hour flight isn't 2 hours, there is also the 1-2 hours getting into the plane itself and the 1-2 hours getting off it and this is before we get into having to drive out to the deep outskirts of the city to even begin that process.
Of course, it's not as nice as having regular, smooth, fast trains. But the situation is not as dire as people make it out to be.
Also, our train system has more than funding parity with roads. Road spending is about $175 billion per year, about half of which isn’t recovered from use fees, for 5 trillion passenger miles. That’s about $0.02 per mile subsidy. Amtrak’s capital expenditures is about $900 million per year, which comes directly from Congress. (Ticket revenue only goes to operating costs.) that’s about $0.13 per passenger mile.
For a guy driving 300 miles, that cost the government $6.00 in road construction and maintenance. For the guy to train that same distance costs the government $39.
That's more people than Chicago itself.
If you take Chicagoland as an endpoint and not the city boundaries, Des Moines is also within 300 miles.
Transcontinental high speed rail is, I agree strongly with your subtextual argument, a pipe dream. But regional HSR in the midwest would make a lot of sense.
But I can totally understand stopping your brain at Ann Arbor if the alternative is to go on to Detroit...
One reason existing tracks and routes don't run that frequently is that there aren't the passengers to make them worthwhile. Another is that those tracks are also used for freight.
Otherwise land values rise too high and fast to establish rights of way.
The British and US rail systems were developed as industrialisation progressed, notably IR2 (coal, steam, iron) and IR3 (steel, electricity, precision).
The US rail system was further developed in the wake of depopulation, genocide, and land appropriation from the indigenous tribal peoples. Governmental land grants to railroads were a major funding mechanism.
Development of HSR has tended to be a Post-WWII phenomenon, originating in Japan, then France, Germany, elsewhere in Europe (though generally not the UK), and recently, China.
The usual factor cited has been density, which matters. But both national economic policy and rights-of-way acquisition costs are massive factors, which the more free-market, strong-private propert rights regimes of the US and UK resist.
Wikipedia's list of HSR systems excludes Switzerland, though lines are presently under construction there (notably GBT): including Belgium, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, Morocco, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Uzbekistan, and Turkey.
That's because, even with all its faults, averaged over all travelers it beats the heck out of all the other alternatives for trips that would take more than a few hours by car or train. Scalzi's experience, as messed up as it was, is an outlier.
But regardless, you can get an idea from the EU. EU rail subsidies amount to 73 billion euro annually. EU rail carried 465 billion passenger-kilometers in 2017, or 300 billion passenger miles. That's a subsidy of $0.24 euro per passenger mile, even worse than Amtrak.
Roads are just really cheap to build and maintain. A 6-lane interstate highway costs $11 million per mile in urban-ish areas: http://blog.midwestind.com/cost-of-building-road. It's going to cost $1.4 billion to add four lanes to the 35 miles of the BW Parkway (which goes through a dense urban area connecting two major cities). At $40 million per mile, that's 1/6 of what it cost to build the Metro Silver line through less dense areas in an existing freeway median. That's 1/9 the per-mile cost of the purple line, a light rail line that mostly travels at grade without its own right of way.
My lord, what?! Three of the top 25 largest cities in the entire US are within 300 miles of Chicago (Columbus, Indianapolis, Detroit), and the Twin Cities (3rd largest metropolitan area in the US, larger than Chicago itself) are only 350 miles away.
Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN-WI MSA 9,498,716
Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI MSA 3,629,190
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistic...
Otherwise any train trip that takes over eight hours is unpalatable, no matter how bad airport security becomes.
http://www2.laufer.com/freight-railroads-fight-new-rule-for-...
According to the article, the guy behind the counter at Hertz agreed with the author about their insane charter flight policy, and tried to help him fix the situation, but was powerless. The red tape was all above his head and much of the confusion/frustration was on the phone with customer support.
You can use your imagination to fill in the details for fun - maybe 8 years ago some stressed-out shift manager without enough people to work the rental desk (due to a freak corporate-mandated hiring freeze) got a call asking for updated contact information for his location and he hesitated a moment and the caller, a temp on loan for the day, helpfully suggested that they just leave the extension blank for now, and marked the location done. And over the next 8 years the company was making its numbers and there was no need to rock the boat and dump a bunch of money into management consultants to tear everything up and start over fresh, and the VP of airports just had a grandkid and was letting his lieutenants run things on autopilot, and the CEO was happy as a clam with his 2pm golf games and expensed steak dinners and had no idea that anything was wrong, etc etc etc etc. The WSJ exposé following Hertz's surprise Chapter 11 filing practically writes itself.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/business/jack-taylor-foun...
This sounds like Hertz just blew it or Signature didn't want to rent a car one-way to this guy and fobbed it off on Hertz.
[0] - FBO -> Fixed Base Operator, basically a service station for private aircraft (whether charters or not; most are not).
Worth following.
This is especially useful if you can’t find a driver that will take you all the way.
Moving truck rentals are better set-up to do one-way trips than the airport car rentals. Also, you won't get the airport surcharge. Might be a little more expensive than a car rental or the Lyft, but I guess you could always fill up the truck with Chicagoland-specific goods, if you wanted.
Kenosha Kickers? Pol-ka, pol-ka...
Once as a private pilot of a 4-seater derping above Colorado I needed to divert to Colorado Springs due to a developing thunderstorm and decided to hanger the airplane to not risk hail damage.
Basically you ring an FBO like Signature (in this case Cutter Aviation), book some hangar space, and show up. Same problem though, flights were being cancelled out of Colorado Springs and every hotel and rental car was booked. It took an hour, but concierge arranged for TWO hertz employees to deliver a car from out of town. My rate was $25 with unlimited miles plus a bit extra for the hail damage waiver. I think the hangar was $50 for the night.
Then the guy is wondering how in the hell he got a $500 charge from Lyft on his credit card statement at the end of the month.
Penn and Teller's "Desert Bus" game simulates a bus drive between LA and Las Vegas.. Debatably the worst video game ever, but now used for charity drives..
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/desert-b...
[0]: https://www.twitch.tv/cinnabarcorp [1]: https://www.twitch.tv/b3ck
It's a fun story to tell, probably refreshingly different from a usual day, and it seems like he at least made a decent wage, if not as much as usual. So at worst it's a small one-day paycut for a nice memorable day.
$0.58 per mile is about how much it costs to lease a car at $350/month and pay for gas, which is what you would do in an upper middle class job requiring lots of travel.
So if you get a new, fairly nice car every three years and use it exclusively for Lyft, you won't make any money.
If you want to make more money than zero, own your car for longer and do some of the maintenance yourself.
Doesn't Lyft require you to drive a fairly new, fairly nice car?
It may be a little conservative, but it's not crazy. You absolutely should be computing TCO of the vehicle and amortizing that if you are driving for a service like Lyft. What fixed costs do you think don't fully apply?
When considering “Should I buy a car to drive Lyft?”, you should consider all costs, of course.
Now can you do that from Dayton to Chicago? I’d be interested to know. You could potentially piece a trip back together with a mix of rides and deadheads.
That's disappointing. There are arguments for both sides of whether it should give the exact location but it ought to at least give the rough number of miles and rough travel time.
The protection/insurance that kicks in when you get in an accident or the driver decides after fifty miles that fuck it, they don't want to drive any more.
- Wish I drove for Lyft
- Lived in Chicago
- Had gotten him as a passenger
After 10-15 miles I would have said "So Mr. Scalzi, I'm going to need you to tell me what the Perry family is up to. Go ahead, I'll give you a few minutes to contemplate, but then you'd better get to telling me" then I'd have also inquired about the next in the Collapsing Empire series.
Joking aside, I'm curious to see more from the driver. What did you think when you accepted the fare curbside aside from "I like long trips"? Did you stay at the destination for a night or immediately drive back? If you have a partner were they a bit upset? What's it like driving a stranger for 5 hours?
As a related aside, I have a friend who frequently takes Uber/Lyft for trips from the CT suburbs to Boston since it often beats flying and the Acela train on both cost and time, especially if he's traveling with family members.
The author's experience with Hertz mirrors my own experiences with them. Much like using UPS, they are an absolute last choice for us. We have a saying in our house: "It's called Hertz because it hurts."
He'd write about Accenture back in the days. And when he did he'd always say: Accenture (pronounced ass-enter).
Sigh. Apologies in advance if this is drifting too much into Reddit territory.
As for that website redesign, I bet that USA Accenture shipped the actual work off to some third world country, probably India. It seems like standard modus operandi to get stuff back from India that only attempts to meet the bare minimum. E.g. as the article notes, just hardwire Hertz specific stuff, so can't easily deal with sister companies like Dollar and Thrifty.
It's a difficult problem to solve with outsourcing. You'll rarely get any sense of ownership from them. And why would you expect any?
The last three times I’ve had international flights, the puddle jumper connecting flights have been so delayed that I missed the connection. It seems like the big flights rarely get delayed, but God help you if you need to fly from, say DC to Philly (145 miles) or Baltimore to New York (250 miles).
On my next-to-last trip, it took American 13 HOURS to get me from DC to Montreal (450 miles). And they lost my luggage. Literally, I could have taken the bus faster.
It’s gotten so bad that I no longer take the puddle jumper flights. I now book to fly directly out of Dulles or Philly or New York and just drive there, or take Amtrak. It’s both faster and cheaper.
Avis still seems to do right by me, and Avis seems to give their minions enough autonomy to actually fix the customer's problem.
My biggest problem with car rental lately is simply that the cars absolutely suck. No backup cameras, no radars, no adaptive cruise, etc. unless you buy the ultra, turbo premium ones. They are rotating their fleets so slowly now that the cars are becoming way behind the curve.
I have a secondary problem in that they are always trying to fob off the SUV onto me despite the fact that I didn't want anything bigger than mid-size.
Due to EU passenger rights regulations, train company was on the hook to get him there somehow, so they ended up paying a taxi to drive him across the Netherlands into Belgium.
> When I got home I tipped him hugely
So, figure maybe $375-400?
Anyway, this guy could have taken a Megabus to from Chicago to Cincinnati for $25 and then done a rideshare the rest of the way. It would have been far less expensive.
Bus Being late to pick up or leave isn’t uncommon. I assume if something goes wrong along the way you should be able to get off with your stuff without too much trouble and order a ride.
But if there’s a big traffic jam. And you might be able to save some time taking inside roads or what have you. A bus isn’t going to do that. You also won’t be able to order a ride share if you’re on the highway with traffic packed up.
I think the situation depends on how important making practice is. Sometimes you’re already on thin ice.
I should also point out that if you have to fly through Chicago frequently, you must know that disruptions anywhere in the US can have a ripple effect and cause problems at O'Hare. The airplanes have to come from somewhere first in order to have an outbound flight...
Chicago is a huge Southwest hub, and Southwest flights almost never show up on travel sites. Additionally, the "nearby airports" rarely show Milwaukee or South Bend, both of which can be reached by train from downtown Chicago. The Amtrak Hiawatha stops at MKE (slightly over an hour from downtown), though it's a bit inconvenient to get to the terminals from the train platform. The South Shore railroad (about 2 hours from downtown) stops right at the South Bend terminal, and you are maybe 100 feet from the gates. Both airports have daily nonstops to all the big hubs in the eastern US, such as Newark and Atlanta. If you feel that you are "stuck" in Chicago, dig a little deeper: you probably aren't.
Just ask Jonas Gray of the Patriots [1].
“On November 16, 2014, Gray rushed for 201 yards, and a franchise-record four touchdowns on 38 carries “
This was such a historic event that he promptly featured the cover of Sports Illustrated [2].
A little bit later he was late for practice. He was essentially benched for the rest of the season. It was also pretty much the end of his career in the NFL.
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Gray
[2]https://amp.si.com/nfl/2014/11/18/new-england-patriots-jonas...
Did not know he graced the cover of SI though.
I might prefer that bus to driving a rental car. 8 hours of nodding off rather than 5 hours of driving.