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> When I was stuck in some distant suburb and had to use taxi companies, the way I "hacked" them to reliably come was to tell dispatch to tell the taxi driver I will tip an extra $20 for the ride. Basically, a form of bribery so the taxi drivers wouldn't ignore the dispatch call.

I find this interesting because on the food delivery side, this is kind of mental gymnastics the worker needs to do. If it is a busy evening hour, do you want to take a (small) McDonalds order? Most likely not, unless there is a nice tip. You could do at least two deliveries in the time you wait for the McD order.

I imagine rider side is the same way as delivery. Every worker has to do this sanity check if whether something is worth doing.

If workers are taking low reward rides or deliveries, it is probably because they think they aren't missing out on something better.

> drivers can ignore it and wait for the more lucrative airport-to-downtown ride for $50. Why? Because the taxi meter only runs when that passenger is in the car so it punishes suburb-to-suburb trips and instead, incentives them to wait for the longer airport trips. So hub-to-suburb and suburb-back-to-hub is "dead time" the drivers are not paid for.

Isn’t it the same for Uber? They don’t get paid to get to your location so the only advantage as a driver is being picking up someone in the area you drop off another passenger. Dispatch worked similarly but it had its limitations of its time.

One thing that was not possible that Uber does is ride sharing.

> They don’t get paid to get to your location so the only advantage as a driver is being picking up someone in the area you drop off another passenger.

That's why the GP talks about a "distributed mesh" of drivers. There's simply more Uber drivers than there have ever been taxis in most places. So in the age of Uber if you're in a suburban area there's a high likelihood there's an Uber driver near you. So there's a small amount of unpaid driving time for the driver. There's also a decent chance of them finding a return passenger at the destination thanks to a similar increase in the number of potential riders vs taxis.

> Because the taxi meter only runs when that passenger is in the car so it punishes suburb-to-suburb trips

Most taxi companies in the suburbs would be a flat rate that the dispatcher would tell you before you got picked up (or the driver would ask the dispatcher curbside), they often didn't use the meter.