SuperShuttle is going out of business | Hacker News Reader

SuperShuttle is going out of business

latimes.com

166 pointslxm133 comments

Let's face it, Ridesharing ate their lunch. I was a religious SuperShuttle user until Lyft showed up - it usually cost me roughly the same amount to take a Lyft shared, I didn't have to wait on the right van to show up, and instead of winding through taking a half dozen other people home first, it often takes me straight home, or at most with a couple of stops.

It's a hard world for traditional scheduled taxiing to be in, when you can summon a vehicle to you on demand.

I remember one time my wife and I took the Super Shuttle home from SFO to Mountain View. It took about two hours since we were the last stop and in fact the shuttle went north a little first before turning south. That was the first and last time I used their service.

I love Lyft but I took a shared lyft for the first time and the driver did three circles around a busy block trying to find a GPS dot (that never moved) that was obviously on the other side of the street, and after an extra 10min jammed an extra person in the car when we hardly fit, despite our protests. That was the last time I took a shared ride.

That’s good for you and for Lyft, if you’re going to protest an extra person because you barely all fit, you’re not a good candidate for shared rides.

I was more bothered by the incentives which require you to spend forever waiting for a driver to figure out how to read a map, locate people, while also being unsafely crammed into a sedan. All because the driver wants to make a few more dollars. Which he could have earned more via tip and a positive review. But mostly is the massive time variability as they could accept multiple rides on the way and reroute each time.

I’m sure it works fine most of the time but I’ve never been a patient/people person who feels it’s worth my trouble to save a few dollars.

My father had a stint driving cars and he was appalled by the story since it was common to a) treat customers with respect (including their time) and b) expertly know how to navigate around a city.

If we’re lowering the denominator of quality of service with casual drivers then I’d rather offset that risk by reducing such responsibilities and variables on the drivers.

In this case, the driver is supposed to mark the other passenger as a no show after 60 or 90 seconds. There's a timer that counts down on the driver app. Many drivers will wait longer, however.

> jammed an extra person in the car when we hardly fit, despite our protests

Are you talking about more people than seatbelts? Or just having three people across the back seat?

If you choose pooled options ride-sharing companies go by the nominal capacity of the car, so four passengers plus the driver in a standard five-seater car.

He probably means that one or more of the two, soon three, people in the back were rather large.

Yes and it was a subcompact sedan while both people had large backpacks on their lap

I am curious how hard a problem it is for the system to figure out what side of the road the driver should be on. Could they put a little arrow or something in the UX so I could point to which side of the street I'm on? Ideally before I order the car so the dispatch algo can prioritize cars that are more likely to approach from the correct side.

If the street is busy it can be hard as a pedestrian to safely get to the other side of the street. I've also had drivers just go the wrong way like I was standing between Gough and and Octavia on Market maybe 10-15meters from Gough. The driver came down Gough and turned left on Market at which point I knew it would be > 10 minutes before they could make all the correct turns to get back to pick me up. I cancel the ride and was surprised the system didn't direct them better.

Looks like civilian GPS accuracy is 4m or so. I could imagine that dropping someone's dot in the middle of a street, and then a driving having to guess which side of the street the error is coming from.

...or know that even numbers are on one side of the street and odds on the other as happens (I'd guess) everywhere.

Some places will put both evens and odds on the same side of the street if there's only one side, and then use more numbers if there is subsequently development on the other side of the street. Some places will assign a new house number whenever a new building is added, no matter where it is located. Some places will number in clockwise (or counterclockwise) direction.

It was a 3 lane one direction road and each time he went to the right hand side because the instead of trying the left handside. And instead of waiting for traffic to clear and thinking she might be on the otherside of the building he went to the back...twice.

This kind of service could probably be impproved with route optimisation and booking using an app. A certain delivery company is already using route optimisation for parcel deliveries so that their employees don't have to think about it, just follow a set course. I don't know if it's enough, though. People would rather take ride hailing services out of convenience anyway. Maybe it could work for smaller vans 6-9 seater with 2-3 stops max instead of cramming up into a shared ride.

I used to use a shared van service fairly regularly. After the second or third time my ~1 hour airport drive turned into a 2-3 hour late night marathon, I stopped doing it.

I had just started using the local Coach airport shuttle because it was so convenient and have begun to travel more. It announced it was shutting down a week or so ago for the same reasons.

Ridesharing will cost me double each way or risk leaving my car at the airport. I'm beginning to dislike Lyft and Uber.

When I was in Vegas it wasn't even worth using them. The lined up procession of cabs is more convenient than trying to find the one car you're supposed to get into, not to mention the same at every airport where ride sharing is just an inefficient mess of slow ubers and riders making rounds in a packed parking garage.

> The lined up procession of cabs is more convenient than trying to find the one car you're supposed to get into,

Lyft has a new feature (I forget what it's called) where instead of directly matching with a specific driver, you get a four-digit number and then stay in line and get in the car when your turn comes. At that point you match with the driver using the number you got.

I haven't seen that yet but it makes a lot of sense. 1:1 matching at a busy airport doesn't really scale. It's one reason I tend to default to cabs flying into airports (and usually take an Uber/Lyft on the return).

I just used this at LAX, it was slick. Much better than my last trip through.

This is actually pretty interesting, but still seems like more ceremony than cabs anywhere that is similar to Vegas in that they have designated pickup areas (I don't know where else this may apply).

One of my drivers told me there was some regulation coming down that would allow the cabs to be more competitive price wise with Uber (I think I paid maybe 10-20% more than the Uber on average I think). If that was the case I'm not sure what benefit fiddling with my phone would offer at all.

I guess the one good thing is it potentially keeps cab prices low there.

McCarran taxi lines in Vegas can be pretty awful. However, ride-share pickup also doesn't really work well at airports where personal pickup/dropoff is already a total mess. One of the things you see happening is rideshare pickup being pushed out to locations away from the terminals.

I'm mostly at the point where I do whatever is most convenient and don't worry too much about the cost. At home, I usually just reserve a car.

yeah but Lyft and Uber

* are often forbidden directly at airport gates

* you need an US sim phone card for phone apps. As a non US person I usually don't have that before traveling to the USA ;(

Or WiFi, which most airports have.

Wifi doesnt often work outside at airports, where you actually find and get in the car.

Having tried this, it's dodgy at best. Wifi at the waiting areas is rare, especially since they're often located pretty far out at the behest of taxi companies.

At McCarran (LAS) I ended up just splitting a taxi cash with another guy from the queue after Defcon. Though considering the taxi driver _insisted_ on taking me to my terminal (for another $7 since he had to leave the airport and re-enter) I was annoyed I couldn't review him.

You can’t sign up for Lyft with WiFi can you.

I think the good part about taxis is that I do not have to summon them at all. There’s always a line waiting wherever I want to leave from (except at LAX, because they don’t understand the concept of taxis... seriously, who takes a shuttle to their taxi, that’s insane).

That depends on the Airport and the time you arrive. I have definitely tried to take a taxi before only to be told "Big flight from XXX just arrived at terminal Z, they are routing all taxis there".

I think a good airport has one exit everyone leaves from, which will have one line of either waiting taxis, or people waiting for taxis.

That’s what I can’t understand: how do SS rides cost so damn much. For that experience I’d expect a flat $10 fee

More than once I had a SuperShuttle driver tell me their credit card machine wasn't working. When I told them I didn't have cash, they'd insist we stop at the ATM on the way home. When I pointed out that the website where I booked plus the outside of the actual van we were in said they accept Visa, they'd really get in a huff. Always magically had paper credit card slips, though. Some of them really sounded vaguely threatening, with the Always Sunny style implication that I needed them to get home. Lucky for me I'm a reasonably large guy and could've just called a cab if needed - I'm sure their shtick worked on a lot of foreign travelers and people who felt intimidated or wanted to avoid confrontation.

For all the hate that Uber gets, I'll always appreciate them for being the first mode of transportation where you have some form of recourse against your driver via ratings/complaints, so the driver has an incentive not to be a total scumbag.

I took my first SuperShuttle on my last conference trip to SF. I didn't talk about payment until I was already at destination, at which point he told me he didn't have a machine. I thought it odd, and just gave him cash. He told me $19 even though the guy at the airport told me $18. Gave him a $20 and went on my way.

Also the ride was very odd. The guy mentioned how he wished he could drive a tank, and even had tank models in the shuttle. And he drove very aggressively and angrily. I couldn't help but thinking he was in the wrong business...

Yeah, the drivers always tended to be a little off... I had one guy run up on the curb while he was looking at his phone, and he yelled when I told him to get off of it. That was the last one I took.

I had another one where the driver got into a shouting match with a customer he dropped off because they didn't tip - at least SS gave me a refund on that one.

I think the reality is that it was a very low-cost franchise, so you'd get people who weren't the kind that could manage normal office jobs but could scrape together 20k.

Nobody is in the right business. There arent exactly lines to become shuttle drivers for dismissive people who assume malice when the damn machine is a POS.

When someone in that industry tells me the machine is broken, I presume they're being dishonest because it benefits them (they avoid fees and presumably tax reporting to the income) and I've seen too many cabs have their machines magically working if you tell them it's CC or they aren't getting paid.

Also, if the machine actually isn't working, they always used to have paper slips to make CC charges. Those are never mentioned unless you tell them it's CC or they aren't getting paid. Dishonesty by omission is very much still dishonesty, and telling someone that the CC machine is broken implies that they can't accept CCs at all.

When I used to fly between SFO and Boston, I would always use Knights in Boston. They are a shared van service that often has 2-3 well-planned stops per ride.

I did Supershuttle once, and the length of time it took for me to get home was absurd. All the other stops just made, what should be a 30 minute ride home, absurdly long.

Good riddance. Supershuttle only made sense if you have a large group and can take up most of the van.

You'd think it'd be obvious that they needed to cut down on the number of stops.

Way back when, I used Knight's regularly and the waiting to pick up someone from a delayed flight and the swapping vans for the drop-off to my house got really annoying. At some point I had the realization that I didn't need to be so penny pinching (and, to be fair, I got more senior so I probably had more latitude).

A relative of mine used the Shuttle last month.

It managed to arrive 30 minutes early for the pickup, yet about 30 minutes late for one of the passengers in the shuttle, who barely able to make their flight.

I've used them once before and the experience was close to what you describe - absurdly long ride for what should have been a 35-minute breeze.

I distinctly recall texting with a friend in 2013 who was a Stanford grad student who opted for Super shuttle instead of Uber/Lyft back to his campus housing. Took him 2+hours instead of the ~30 minutes.

Exact thing happened to me on a shared shuttle ride from LAX to Redondo. Went all the way down to drop off people at Long Beach first.

Vans make sense if you have a toddler in a state without an occasional trip exception but with a transit van exception. Try getting a kid to an airport...sheesh. The bus is often the only option.

We took Knights once with a 10-month-old. It made sense because we flew with our car seat. Apparently, they'll store the car seat for the ride home.

Now that we have two kids, and prefer to rent a car seat or use mass transit at our destination, we park at Logan. It costs about the same. (It also makes sense because we no longer live where Knight's services.)

I miss the Quake City airport shuttle drivers at SFO. They were usually over-educated liberal arts graduates, sufficiently "alternative" in their grooming to thwart their hiring in ordinary jobs (even S.F. employers used to be uptight about that). Spent one ride home getting a useful summary of the latest Terence McKenna book.

I use SuperShuttle pretty much all the time. I understand why the service is widely disliked. Most people expect a predictable shared ride with least surprises. The pick up is predictable but not the ride itself. Sometimes it's like 3-4 stops and the whole thing takes a long time.

On the other hand, I have tried uber shared ride from airports and it's way worse (at SFO). The rides keep getting cancelled. Late at night, you have to keep re-booking or do a non-shared ride for a very high price. Atleast with super shuttle, pick up is never an issue.

> The rides keep getting cancelled.

And this should reflect in the driver/operator's reputation on Uber or Lyft.

Just like a physician's office keeping cancelling patients' appointments.

When did you try Uber at SFO? They changed the pickup process a few months ago and it's been a nightmare ever since. I've found the trick is to make the trek through the airport to the International terminal where they're still allowed to pick up curbside.

I thought this, until my ride to the airport was cancelled , 20 minutes before the arrival. I almost missed my flight, good thing Uber wasn’t particularly busy that day (this is in Pittsburgh where rider supply can really screw you).

City to city shuttles and buses seems to be growing. The one I'd been taking from Flagstaff, AZ to Phoenix and back got bought out by a national company called Groome, while FlixBus, Megabus, and OurBus have been adding routes in Arizona (my home state) and Florida (where I live now). In Colorado there is a publicly run bus called Bustang that goes long distances including from Denver to Fort Collins. I also took a publicly run bus from Merced to Yosemite, and its service had recently expanded. There seems to be a lot happening in the space with reduced rates of car ownership [1].

I think the place they're in between got squeezed on both ends, and so did some of their customers, for whom neither UberPool nor city to city shuttles is as good of an option, or an option at all.

1: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/demographic-shif...

I preferred supershuttle over uber/lyft because of more certainty and it works as a good forcing function for me to be at the airport well in time. Just this Friday was my first bad experience where they called me at 2:30 am to cancel my 4 am shuttle. A double whammy as it killed any chance of getting a few winks. I was really annoyed and thought that that was weird because supershuttle never cancelled on me before. This probably explains it. I'll miss the service but I see why it's not viable.

Same. I generally take rail to my airport except it doesn't run at all hours. I know I can count on a shuttle to get me to the airport but don't want to risk a rare Lyft driver at that hour deciding against taking me an hour to the airport. Helps that shuttle is half the cost and doesn't make it take all that much longer.

The first time I landed in the US, I took SuperShuttle from the airport to my apartment 60 miles away. The company I worked for had paid for it ahead of time and they dropped me at the door. Sad to see the business go away, because of VC subsidies.

this is hardly surprising. a ride to SFO from my home using uber/lift is about $23. $19 using supershuttle. And I don't have to schedule anything or take a long van ride while other passengers are being dropped off.

Very unfortunately for the mom & pop supershuttle franchisees, though, with van payments and a dried up source of income.

Damn, so sounds like a MoviePass situation? VCs subsidizing transportation now instead of entertainment?

The one reason I take super shuttle to the airport is because I can schedule it ahead and I can at least be certain they will do whatever they can to honor the reservation. While for now uber/lyft are probably available often enough there is no guarantee that one is going to be available especially if you are flying very early or late.

You can schedule an Uber ahead of time.

Or a Lyft!

wait till they jacked up their prices... then we will miss super shuttle

I've never used uber/lyft. While I watched the movie Stuber, the protagonist had never used it either and tried using it like a taxi. I felt like an out-of-touch old guy learning how stuff works along with him.

But if you schedule a ride for tomorrow they'll wait until the time of the ride and then look for drivers. It's handy if you might forget, but it misses the most handy part of the old model: they'll either tell you yes or know, and then you know ahead of time if it'll be possible to get a ride.

Neither Uber or Lyft will even tell you if historically drivers have been available if you request a weird time. In some places you can call an Uber at 5am, in others that'd never work, and figuring out which requires local knowledge which runs contrary to the whole point of Uber/Lyft.

That's not what scheduling an Uber actually does, though.

"The Scheduled Rides feature allows you to select a 10 minute window for a driver to come pick you up. At the start of the window, the app will send out a ride request on your behalf."

So if you "schedule a ride" at 7pm, it is exactly the same as just using the app manually at 6:50pm. There is absolutely nothing remotely close to a guarantee that anyone will you pick you up at all, much less at the time you chose.

In my case, there is no way there are going to be drivers available at 4am to take me 45 miles to the airport which is fairly typical of what I need. There are barely drivers available to do it during the day and cancelations for going into the city are not infrequent. I just use a private car service even though it's about 2x the price.

You’d be surprised. Try doing a dry run sometime. I did countless early morning pickups.

Why bother? I can book a reliable service and it’s a business expense.

Not exactly for Lyft when I drive for them. Scheduled ride is a priority request that will go far out of the area. Lyft will happily ping a driver from 30+ miles away 30 minutes in advance. It will also pull a driver from the virtual queue at an airport.

I think we did a Lyft once where we scheduled the night before and a specific driver accepted the ride that evening, then showed up at the godawful time in the morning that we specified. It was basically like arranging a taxi, but through the app. Did that feature go away or get changed? It was a year or two ago.

That feature is still there. The guy to whom you replied was mistaken.

I believe you are mistaken.

Three days ago I scheduled an Uber for 5:00AM-5:10AM.

It arrived at 4:57AM.

EDIT: Perhaps you misread the description...

"The Scheduled Rides feature allows you to book a trip in advance by selecting a 10-minute pickup window. The driver will be requested on your behalf and will arrive in the 10-minute window you've selected. In the case where a driver is not available, you'll be notified."

https://help.uber.com/riders/article/scheduling-a-ride-in-ad...

There would be little sense to doing what you suggested (queueing rides 10min in advance for scheduled riders) because Uber can use scheduled rides as constraints for pathing of vehicles, and some areas would have a greater than 10 minute wait time for pickup.

You can but it doesn’t actually guarantee a ride. They don’t actually use it.

Source: friend who works at Uber who looked into exactly this topic.

I tried that, and 5 minutes before pickup, the driver canceled. The next available driver was 15 minutes later -- stressful.

The only time I failed to find a ride to airport on Uber/Lyft was in Singapore at 4am when Uber just started their operation there. Other than that, no matter how odd the hour is, I was able to find a ride, albeit sometimes with longer wait time (10 min-ish). I personally think the risk is negligible, unless drivers leave them en masse.

Then you need to plan your trip ahead of time.

With SuperShuttle, you can't predict who they are going to pick up along the way either.

I don't know how I could plan my trip any more ahead of time than making a reservation. You can't predict who else is going to be picked up but you are given a pickup window that is set in such a way, according to when your flight departs, that you will be at the airport within the suggested timeframes, regardless of who else gets picked up along the way. Granted you lose a little flexibility but the tradeoff is more certainty.

Sample size of 1, but I was able to get an Uber at 4am in a C-list (D-list) city --can I even call it a city?-- in my hometown where I grew up. Had to wait ~20 minutes for it, though.

It's come to the point where mode of transportation isn't even a concern when I need to get somewhere. Uber is always a reliable fallback when public transportation or a friend isn't available to drop me off.

This is the one situation where I still rely on a good old fashioned taxi driver. George, to be specific.

George heads up a bunch of WhatsApp-connected drivers of higher-end cabs here in Melbourne, Australia. There’ll be a George in your city, you just need to find him.

I message George the day before a 6am flight, and there has never failed to be a nice taxi outside my door at 4:45am as requested.

I hope this is what the taxi industry here becomes. The junky old cabs that stink and have dodgy bearings get killed by Uber et. al., while the decent cabbies, guys like George who have been driving for decades, stick around.

How do I find my local George?

Hail a nice cab and look for a card on the dashboard. Or just ask the driver for their number.

This probably won’t get you George, but it’s a start.

Alternatively, go to your local airport at 8pm on a Thursday evening. There’ll be all sorts of people in suits getting picked up. Find the nicest car with an old guy driving it.

Uber/Lyft drivers frequently hand out cards in major markets after airline flights in an attempt to cut out Uber/Lyft.

In the case of SFO, BART is also a pretty good alternative in a lot of cases since it was connected to the airport. I'm usually going into the general Moscone area and, while I used to take buses now and then, I doubt if I've done so in a decade. (And I take a taxi or Uber/Lyft for other locations that the shuttles mostly don't serve very well anyway.)

last time I rode BART from sfo, a crazy guy attacked a german tourist.

Maybe the franchisees could buy the brand and set up a coop with an app? Not sure what the main value proposition for the franchisees is, is it the customer stream or does Supershuttle have some kind of important infrastructure at the airports?

Another indication of the super-poor state of public transport in the US.

This super-nation is so ridiculously behind in this regard in every aspect of development of public transport that you have to consider if the people in force have all their senses together.

This is private transportation, addressing needs that public transportation doesn't address anyway (mostly random residential to/from airports).

Why wouldn't that be a need public transport addresses? Most airports are connected via railway or subway, right?

In the US? My experience is that most airports are not connected by railway or subway. Admittedly most of my trips were more than 10 years ago, but I would be very surprised if things have drastically changed. Yes, in Europe it starts to be become rarer that major airports have only bus connections.

There's probably no more than twenty airports in the US with rail/subway connections. Notably the second busiest (LAX) does not have a rail connection but they're finally building one.

I count 25:

Boston, Cleveland, Chicago O'Hare, Chicago Midway, Providence, JFK, LGA, Newark, Philly, BWI, DCA, Atlanta, SFO, Oakland, Denver, Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Portland, Seattle, Dallas/Fort-Worth, St. Louis, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Milwaukee, Salt Lake, Phoenix.

If you include proposed or in construction links, there's also Honolulu, Washington Dulles, Orlando, LAX. There's also a few more airports that have bus service to the light rail line (e.g., San Jose airport).

Essentially, every city with a subway system has a stop at the airport, LA and San Juan being the two exceptions here. Some commuter rail networks stop at the airport. Several light rail systems don't stop at the airport, particularly if the airport is well out of the center of town. So it's more of indictment of the degree to which US cities lack rail transit.

Thanks for that list! I haven't lived in the SF Bay Area for ten years and I totally missed that Oakland has a BART station now.

LGA has no rail connection and JFK isn't directly connected, you have to transfer to and pay extra exorbitant fare for the AirTrain.

Fort Lauderdale's rail link is basically the same as San Jose's: you take a shuttle bus connection to a rail station off airport grounds.

True, it always shows me that I have arrived in an underdeveloped country when I arrive at an airport and there is no reasonable public transport available. SFO and JFK being some laudable exceptions.

On the positive side a SuperShuttle ride can be a great experience. You get to know 5 locals and half of the city already in your first 2 hours there.

Well it is a self-reinforcing loop. Cites are not designed for walking, there are huge areas used for parkings, the own car is really the only choice when there is no huge public transport network. And there won't be one when everyone has a car.

Back in the day, I used SuperShuttle over taxis for airports, but when ridesharing arrived, it was just much more convenient. For early morning flights, there was no more getting up super early so you can be on a shuttle that picked up a few more people.

That said, I miss SuperShuttle because I met some really interesting people on it in the SF Bay Area. Some of the more notable people I talked to included one of the original engineers on the Apple Lisa and one of Larry Ellison's private plane pilots. It was neat to listen to stories from both.

Care to share some :-)

Very interesting in that SuperShuttle was sold to a PE firm specializing in distressed assets in September. This bankruptcy was likely already a given at that time.

You wonder what analysis went into that deal. Just the month before, Uber had announced a $5.2 billion loss for the quarter, which gives a sense of the competitive landscape SuperShuttle faced.

There are also arguments that PE has been doing a lot of poor deals lately and institutions allocating to them are going to be disappointed:

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/02/private-equity-ov...

Thanks for the link - this article is eye-opening.

Came here to say this. I'm not sure their bankruptcy was a given at the time, but I do wonder how much money they took out of the deal in exchange for cheap debt that the company is now defaulting on.

Franchisees took on all the risk here - how does the parent go bankrupt unless it was a debt-based grab?

Yes, it was a $$ grab by the investment firm that took over in Sept. Transdev, their previous parent co, gave Blackstreet Capital Holdings somewhere around $20ml to take ownership of SuperShuttle. From what I understand Transdev had tax credits coming due from losses they took in previous years and this was an easier out. There were others who were interested and in the game who were going to take less and actually keep it running but they were not considered. Not sure why Transdev didn't take either of those offers. Also, Transdev filed a suit last month in Delaware over a $7ml dispute in working capital adjustments with Blackstreet. Side note, person heading up the takeover from Blackstreet was not nice at all, to be polite.

The problem with Supershuttle was the variability and never knowing quite what you were going to get. You could get a straightforward ride home (+25% for the extra dropoffs), or you could get a 2x of your journey time and a shady driver.

The manual pooling of rides (suboptimal), low volume, and subjectivity of the driver deciding how to drive just couldn't make for a consistent and good experience. And add to that the inability to enforce or provide feedback essentially gave you taxi driver incentives to cheat / work the system.

Much as Uber/Lyft has its disadvantages, I say good riddance to Supershuttle.

Oh wow that's sad. I have been taking SuperShuttle for over 15 years and have always had positive experiences. Being able to schedule rides outweighed any uncertainty around how long the trips might be, particularly around busy holidays. I also appreciated how local franchises took pride in building their businesses. A shame to see it run aground on the shoals of VC subsided gig work.

I started in 2013 to have a yearly trip to Miami for a cruise at the beginning of February. For a solo traveler, taxi had been rather expensive unless you managed to pool with someone right at the airport, so I was glad to find the shuttle operators sitting next to the taxis right at the curb, and I could just walk there and get a ride. Nice low barrier to entry. Especially after realizing that indeed, public transport of the kind typically found at international airports in most other countries (trains, buses) was almost non-existent there.

While I clearly see how Uber and Lyft can provide an identical or better service (because of less drop-off stops) I still think the higher barrier to entry of a) having to know about them and b) having to download an app and open an account is a significant downside, especially for foreigners who haven't been in the US yet. It's another slightly weird thing that you have to know about and prepare for in advance.

I have been the foreigner using an unfamiliar terminal. Since it was a cruise to Vancouver, my cruise travel agent recommended I use a cruise message board for that city. I thereby got info on the whole range of options. Plus of course we could have used the cruise line's transfer (i.e. big ole bus) from cruise ship to airport. We hired a car and got a description from the driver of the places we passed through. Thus I learned to use such message boards as a starting point. Plus I learned to have contacts.

Good. They almost killed my late wife and I. While we were on board I watched the Shuttle driver force a car up onto the side walk to avoid a collision. If anyone had been standing at that corner they would have been killed. That was only one incident in a half hour ride!

In LA I found it was cheaper to have a Limo on call than use a taxi and more reliable than the ride sharing services. The Limo driver made it seem more like a tour explaining the things we drove by, unlike they others that had no interest in anything other than our $.

Good, fuck these guys. Twice at LAX, following a paid reservation, they just never picked me up. I got refunded but believe me it's no fun waiting 2+ hours, past midnight, and then getting the last cab there when you realize your ride has dropped the ball. Rideshare apps are vastly better. If we didn't have the legacy of taxi system today, we'd have just gone straight to Lyft.

Super shuttle was too expensive for what it was. For less than twice the cost I could schedule a town car. For a single rider the shuttle was cheaper, but for me it was always to log. And I was shocked when I saw two and three people groups take the shuttle. The turning point for me was when the shuttle refused to take the faster hov lane.

> when the shuttle refused to take the faster hov lane

Any guesses as to why?

I doubt this is why, but... on Hwy 101 near SFO, I see lots of rear-end accidents in the HOV lane. Speeds often go from 65 mph to 0 in seconds (crash), whereas the other lanes go from 30 to 0 (hard braking).

Granted, if you're alert, the HOV lane can offer some median space to swerve into.

I had a GREAT super shuttle experience years ago https://medium.com/this-happened-to-me/supershuttle-gave-me-...

Not only will some not miss Super Shuttle because of its occasional marathon ride, but also others will not miss it for their drivers’ tendency to appear and disappear from the pickup location at a random time without even calling.

> In November, Lyft, Uber and taxis were relegated to a pickup lot next to Terminal 1; travelers can either walk there or wait for an airport shuttle to ferry them.

I really hate cities that do this.

It's because LAX is too small to fit all the traffic. It's gridlocked in the entire airport at peak times. You can literally walk the entire terminal loop in 20 mins, it's like 4 lanes, and it gets the most traffic in America IIRC. It's the biggest airport clusterfuck in america.

LAX is a nightmare to drive to for dropping off passengers, though, so I'm actually fine with the policy here. It's the busiest origin and destination airport in the US so it has the most people entering and leaving landside.

If and only if there's a decent public transit alternative (train, metro, etc.) from the original terminal to the city then I really like cities that do this. That's rarely the case in the US and isn't at all at LAX, for now, but hopefully that will change within the decade.

They don't really have a choice. Boston had the same problem and moved the pickup to Central Parking.

It's not really that bad although I'm sure at least somewhat confusing to arrivals familiar with the airport. I did one of my rare drive-ins to the airport last week--usually get a car--and I walked by the pickup area on the way to parking. It's well-marked and is no further away than most of the parking is. (Doesn't need a airport shuttle.)

SuperShuttle is garbage. Unpredictable timing, you don't know how many stops so you have to budget in more time. If you aren't traveling alone (e.g. family of 2,3 or more) it is substantially more than a taxi, uber, or lyft. Miserable reviews on Yelp. I have a hard time buying the nostalgia here... It was a bad version of UberPool to compete with taxis back in the day, but obsolete now.

https://www.yelp.com/biz/supershuttle-south-san-francisco-2?...

They had $20 dollar rebate that was really hard to claim and had relations with a shady company called Great Fun I'm sure pissed of many customers ...don't blame Uber or the new stuff... SuperShuttle thrived in era where there was little real competition but company had mismanagement issues, bad employees, and it was not innovative and when competition came along they just tanked

Sad to see profitable businesses falling prey to “new, cool, trendy” businesses that will hardly ever be profitable and are waiting for the investment bubble to deflate.

I had to catch an AM flight in Austin. Used SuperShuttle to book my trip to the airport. I literally was the first person he picked up. We drove for like an hour all over Austin picking up a couple more people. It was night out still so I had no idea where we were because I was tired. Anyway, Finally got to the airport. After that no more SuperShuttle. This was ten years ago and I’m glad things have changed.

Ah, SuperShuttle. Great idea, poor execution. Back in 2011, one 10pm ride home (from a very nice trip to Kauai), the driver was apparently dozing off during the ride, and veering into the opposing lane - this happened multiple times and he was resentful to anyone who corrected him.

I bet during that ride lost their business for good for every single passenger on that ride.

Just wanted to point out that every Soviet citizen could have predicted this. They have tried marshrutka: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka

SuperShuttle hasn't served Denver International for a while. I remember seeing their vans frequently, but I have to imagine here the new airport train as well as ride sharing ate their lunch. I haven't not used the train ever since it opened.

i saw so many of their buses and vans engaging in wildly dangerous behavior when the weather was bad, along E470 and further north. i assume their insurance cut them off at some point.

I use Green Ride Boulder which is the same concept as SuperShuttle but way better execution. Scheduled rides, most people get on and off at the office, but they will drop you off at your door after the office customers.

They could have pivoted to solving intercity shuttles. Works well in that 1-2 hour range between cities without good buses or trains.

Groome Transportation in the southeast looks to be doing this well!

I only remember their Vans leaving SFO driving very slowly on 101 , which seems to match what people is commenting

I can't believe it took this long. SuperShuttle offers worse-than-Greyhound service at UberX prices.

In the mid 1990s, I commuted from San Diego to SF for a tech lead job on an AI project. Super Shuttle at the time worked very well for me, even though I typically lost twenty minutes waiting forthe van drop offs before my drop off point. With a 6am flight, I arrived at the office earlier than almost all my local colleagues. Yeah, today, I would use Uber or Lift.

If its too good to be true, it’s probably subsidized by venture capital

Sure is, but it's an arbitrage opportunity for everyone who wants a ride.

Huge in Mexico, especially cities with rideshare ban (Cancun).

Cancun needs to get their shit together and stop taking bribes from the taxi unions.

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