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Comment by gcheong | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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

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.

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.

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.

You can schedule an Uber ahead of time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Or a Lyft!

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

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.

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