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Comment by notRobot | Hacker News Reader

I lived for a long time in a place that's super unsafe for women and members of the LGBT+ community (assault, rape, lynching, etc).

When ridesharing apps came, they made commuting so much safer for these people.

It's much, much easier to find transport, and the drivers know their locations are tracked so they tend to not misbehave.

Not to mention that they broke the previous taxi companies' monopolies which used to have crazy prices - which made safe transport inaccessible to many.

So if they're enabling people who like to get drunk to do so in a safer manner, so be it. It's a small cost to pay. Ride sharing apps aren't perfect, but they're much better than anything that came before.

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For this reason I feel like rideshares have a mandate and shouldn’t have surge pricing for a customers. If you are blackout drunk and see ubers at 2am are $120, there is a nonzero chance you might just opt to drive drunk or do something else unsafe.

What is the alternative. Black out drunk at 2am and no rideshares available doesn't seem like a better option.

Perhaps minimum loading after 10pm to help with driver availability and service providers providing a minimum of x vehicles per hour slot?

Consistent prices?

Consistent prices likely leads to drivers knocking off well before 2AM. Surge pricing is a means to create an increased supply of drivers, by giving them a powerful incentive: a more attractive price for their work.

If I was driving a car for a living my price for a 9 am commute to the office would be much less than a 3 am possibly drunk passenger. It has a much higher chance of being a headache.

Price is the most fair way to prioritize rides. $120 is a big amount of money for a ride, but not big enough to make you go bankcrupt. Valuable lesson learned, drink less next time and leave earlier before surge pricing.

Drink more and leave later

That hard to do if the establishment is closing, or if state law requires they close at a specified time.

>$120 is a big amount of money for a ride, but not big enough to make you go bankrupt.

I think that really depends on the person, also drunk people are not anywhere known for their good planning and reasoning skills.

I would take a bikeshare then :)

In Holland we're pretty accustomed to cycling home drunk, and drivers are pretty aware of hazardous bikers :) Especially because Taxis are unaffordable in the Netherlands.

The magic ingredient that makes cycling home drunk surprisingly safe (I carry various scars documenting the limitations of that safety) is that it usually happens at night during a time of very low traffic intensity. Be very, very careful about applying drunk cycling confidence earned in the night to the odd daytime drinking occasion. Far too many things happening at the same time to keep aware of, feels like running out of RAM.

Low traffic intensity is a two-sided sword, it can lead to speeding and to inattentiveness. But those downsides are much less pronounced for cycling than for driving: for speed it's obvious (yet all of my scars from cycling drunk are purely from liking to go fast, nobody else involved), but the difference in terms of inattentiveness is even more pronounced: sitting out in the wind on a two-wheeler that almost but not quite balances itself is so much different from sitting in a comfy chair surrounded by entertainment electronics peeking out at the world through small windows and a set of mirrors that even the sober rarely use to is full potential.

Don't forget good bicycle infrastructure

In the US you can still get a DUI even when cycling drunk. Safer than driving drunk, sure, but not safer for you legally.

In Holland you technically can too, but the cops don't arrest you for it anyway.

So many times we waved bye to the cops on the main square when stumbling out of the pub at 4am and swerving off on the bike. And all they would do is wish us a safe trip home.

It's just the 'done thing' over there. At least it was when I was at the partying age.

Germany has a surprisingly reasonable compromise: you can get a DUI, lose your driver's license and all that, but the threshold for BAC is set twice as high for cycling as it is for driving. Actually these days the limit is more than three times that of driving, because apparently when they dropped the driving threshold from 0.8 to 0.5 the cycling threshold did not get automatically updated like in some excel formula. Fortunately, because I was afraid that the difference might disappear entirely when the driving threshold gets dropped to zero (only a matter of time I think, given how much drunk driving is perceived as a "boomer thing").

When I'm out on the bike, not drunk at all, I'd rather cross paths with a hundred wildly inebriated cyclists than even just one moderately tipsy driver.

Hmm, this would not have saved me back in my partying days. I'm sure I would have been many times over the threshold :P

The good news is that cycling is apparently much easier than walking (don't ask me how I know!), so they'd likely underestimate your BAC if you're beyond trying funny stuff.

This varies by jurisdiction. In Washington State, cycling drunk is legal.

True. I said "in the US" which is almost never going to be a completely accurate statement for anything that follows.

In Switzerland you can lose your driver's license when cycling drunk. I think I prefer your system.

It's strange that you lose an authorization to do during because you misbehaved somewhere else.

I wonder if you also lose your pilot license :) Or the sailing one.

Cycling drunk probably involves a violation of the same laws that are managed by your driving license. So it’s somewhat like “since you can’t obey the license-free part of this law, we will not allow you the licensed privileges”.

The same law perhaps, but a lot less endangerment of others and a bit more endangerment of self.

Still not great but still a lot more responsible towards others IMO.

Regarding the endangerment though I would generally be very very cautious while cycling drunk. E.g. stopping at every crossroads to check if anything was coming even if nothing was. I never even had a near miss (at least as far as I can remember, to be fair my memory is a little vague :P )

One thing that was kinda surprising is that I seemed a lot better at cycling on icy roads somehow. I'd be more relaxed as sober I'm usually super worried about slipping and tend to overcorrect etc. I've fallen lots of times sober and only once while drunk.

Same in Germany

Drunken me is more likely to agree to pay the surge price. It seems like a good mechanism to get more people driving and transport the highest possible % of the drunks safely home.

If you’re on the Uber app while blackout drunk at 2AM, chances are pretty good that you’re not where your car is.

Uber and Lyft could drop the 2am surge pricing, and replace it with heavy charges for puking, pissing yourself, hitting on the driver, and making misogynistic, racist, or homophobic remarks.

Should the world revolve around the whims and needs of people who do extremely questionable things like get blackout drunk?

Ride sharing apps are shit, especially because of the prices, like are you really suggesting that workers need to be paid like shit without benefits and social security, because you want to go out even if you can't afford it? If taxis and means that allow people to live with dignity for their work are too expensive, then don't go out, go out less often, find a better job

You got to be kidding ! I would say Taxis are shit. It's not like taxi drivers are leading stellar lives in their mansions. Most of them are struggling to make ends meet, while benefiting the taxi union or whatever shit that runs the monopoly. How is this any different from Uber/Lyft. At least, here you have an option you can drive for multiple ride share without having to fork out your kidney for a deposit at the taxi union.

Local transportation is a basic service. Ideally, your taxpayer money goes into providing one. But we all know how inefficient that is, especially in areas with low population density. So, short of that, Uber and Lyft are the next best thing to happen in transportation. Will that increase binge drinking, yes, so be it. So be it, because people who binge drink will do it anyway. If they don't drink at a bar they will drink at home. The correlation of binge drinking to the availability of ride hailing needs to be questioned.

Taxis are expensive mostly because of the monopolies. You are basically arguing that it's ok they are expensive. You argue that the group of people should be allowed to monopolize as elemental activity as providing safe transportation and price it however high they like. And the rest of us should just accept it and either do without access to safe transportation or struggle even more in our lives than we do to afford it. Just so a group of monopolist can earn money off of us that they couldn't have if they didn't manage to write their little monopoly into the law.

I know driving for Uber is not really a stellar job. But some people do it because that's the best they can do at the moment. They could never afford to drive a taxi. They could never be able to pay the dues for entering the monopoly. They would have to undertake even worse job.

The problem is not that those jobs pay little and provide no security. The problem is that people who decide to take those jobs are left without help to such a degree that they take them.

Introduce basic income and look how the conditions of ride-share drivers improve when they have a choice and some bargaining power.

I sort of agree that it's like a race to the bottom. It's not necessarily easy to find a higher paying job though. And someone has to fill the shitty jobs, so the real solution is worker protection policy like unions, minimum wage, and international trade asymmetries.

> are you really suggesting that workers need to be paid like shit without benefits and social security

Where did I suggest that?

>Not to mention that they broke the previous taxi companies' monopolies which used to have crazy prices

Define crazy prices for someone trying to provide for a family on a 40 hour week, working at unsociable hours.

It wasn’t the drivers making money under the old system. Those medallion loan payments weren’t cheap.

Rent seeking is the cause of the majority of price problems, be it land, medallions or other forms

I means it’s the government who gets paid the medallion fee. So is the government “rent seeking”?

Yeah, I never understood why the government wasn't one blamed for this insanity. Transferable licenses? Okay, selling company sure, but in any other case it should be returned to pool and reallocated for marginal fee(a few hundred at max).

I wonder how many other industries would provide reasonable rates if they had to buy a license to operate from someone else currently operating.

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