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Comment by sfifs | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it is "marginally better" where you come from. Uber and their ill have always been always parity priced or more expensive in the markets I have lived in. The killer value proposition is the car actually turns up in a timely manner and actually takes passengers to where they want to go. Taxis often simply were eother not available to call, rarely showed up even if called and would often refuse to go where passengers want. Uber and its competitors literally makes it possible to live in the cities i live in without owning a car because even if you regularly commute by public transport, for those occasions where you need a car, you know you will get one reliably. In the past that was not an option and you would have to own a car.

Hopefully a good reminder to not extrapolate personal experiences or propaganda of the circle one may be a part of to the whole world.

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> and would often refuse to go where passengers want

This happens to me all the time with Uber when I land at LAX and want to go to Anaheim or I’m in SF and want to go to San Jose.

And unlike a taxi, half the time Uber charges me $5 claiming that I ghosted the driver rather than them refusing to take me, something I don’t always catch.

I thought that Uber drivers could not see your destination until they picked you up. Are drivers taking off and refusing at the moment of pickup in SF? Seems like that would be pretty easy to catch behavior.

In NYC, I had several drivers refuse to let me into the car until I told them where I was going. I never took those cars and made them cancel it (and then reported it). However, it is common practice.

>Are drivers taking off and refusing at the moment of pickup in SF?

Yes. Although usually what they do is call first and ask where you are going to.

I've absolutely had times where I've had them refuse either after I got in the car, or they don't unlock the doors until I tell them.

Does anyone still pick up? After a few calls and cancelled rides, you quickly learn not to answer anymore if you want the car to arrive.

i reckon uber could make this a more difficult thing to occur by matching the GPS signals and location data.

If a driver attempts this, they can make it so that the driver cops the fee if the user could either prove that they are near the pickup location, or was able to take a picture of the car (with license plate).

I can see this personally happening more and more in Romania when I go visit relatives, and locals confirmed me the trend. At some point soon there won't be any reason anymore picking Uber over taxis.

Well, iphones have also only existed since little before Uber came around.

The reason that was the only way cabs were available because those were the only communication technologies available.

Maybe what you should be demanding is that cab services provide apps so you don't have to hail/call, etc. There are several companies that can provide this for your cab jurisdiction area as a third party service and they won't price gouge the cab drivers and/or the customers, and they won't use illegal threats and bribes to change laws to suit their needs.

I’ve used non-Uber taxi apps in cities like Austin and they failed to show up multiple times and about 50% of the time the “finding driver” part takes about 15-20 minutes before I gave up and just used Uber (one time my phone died during this process and I was left with no taxi). It’s obviously treated like a 3rd tier part of their companies.

People want tech companies providing taxi services, they don’t just want the old local taxi service with a half-assed app bolted on + the usual dirty city taxi cars w/ no review process.

Non-Uber taxi apps in Germany are horrible.

The apps are buggy and the service is unreliable.

Uber is far better in my experience.

In Sweden, I have had the opposite experience. The Uber app is never used, due to how low paid the drivers are. The taxi apps are actually decently good and pretty reliable. They are not as feature rich as the Uber app, and more expensive, but when you need a ride at three in the morning, don't expect the Uber app to get you one.

I don't know why the app would need anything more than "I want to be picked up here". Dispatching worked fine when you had to call a phone number. The app could literally be an interface to texting.

Because no one wants to sit and wait around wondering if a car will show up?

> Dispatching worked fine when you had to call a phone number.

Dispatching absolutely did not work fine when you had to call a number. You were often left twiddling your thumbs wondering if a car will actually show up.

> The app could literally be an interface to texting.

Why not start your own competitor then? I'm sure it will be easy to create such a simple app. Better include some load-balancing, because I'm sure everyone will rush to use your featureless app instead of these other apps with nice interfaces, that show you exactly where the car is, with accurate ETAs, integrated payment, safety features, etc.

Have you ever even used the Uber app?

> You were often left twiddling your thumbs wondering if a car will actually show up.

They always showed up for me. And I have no idea what city/country you think it didn't. I feel like this is just Uber PR.

> Why not start your own competitor then?

Because the network effects of drivers and network effects of riders. It would cost a lot of money to compete with that. Also, to deal with a lot of other backend issues that have nothing to do with the app itself - like making sure the driver's cars are in good repair, commercial insurance, etc.

The actual app itself is much easier compared to the business side of things. If someone wants to do the business side, I'll spearhead the app development.

> Have you ever even used the Uber app?

Yes. Also, I never said it was trivial to create a clone of the Uber app. I said things worked fine before there was a complex app and would work okay with a simpler app. Because the complaint I was responding to wasn't feature parity, it was bugginess. But lets go through your points.

>that show you exactly where the car is

Uber actually has admitted that the majority of the cars you see on your screen are simulated to give you a feeling for how many cars are in the area.

Or do you mean once a driver is assigned, in which case I don't know the point of it. I can just look at the ETA.

> with accurate ETAs

Now who never used the Uber app. Their ETAs are wildly inaccurate.

> integrated payment

That you have to check and dispute in case the bill you for drivers cancelling on you, and a variety of other things hooked directly to your card. I'd much rather pay people what I owe them in a one-off transaction.

> safety features

I've never seen them in action, but I'm glad they're building them.

Can we collectively agree that the reason why people are reporting very different experiences with cabs before uber, is because cab-rides in different locations were very different experiences?

In London, the chance that calling a cab (or even the less regulated minicab services) would result in a no-show seemed remote. In San Francisco, it was a regular occurrence. In the rural UK, calling a cab would have been a rare, expensive event, and would require finding an unoccupied local driver among a very small subset.

I'm sure there is even a wider variety of taxi implementations worldwide.

> cab-rides in different locations were very different experiences?

Sure. I'll agree with that.

and i’ve used uber in austin and had some of the worst experiences i’ve ever had. personal anecdotes dont really matter— uber is a shitty company and so are taxis, two wrongs dont make a right.

Uber fails to show up for me about half the time. It just goes through driver after driver, moving to another when the previous one doesn’t come well past the estimated time. Has happened in three different cities in the past three months.

The reason that was the only way cabs were available because those were the only communication technologies available.

Nah, it was would because taxi company owners are lazy morons. Well, to put a better face on it, a given one-city taxi company would have at a most a few hundred drivers and maybe ten actually back-office/real-employees. That level of small business isn't going to create a web interface to their operations in the early 2000s. Sure, third parties were offering some high priced web-based hailing service but of course that kind of thing would have to be higher priced than the already high-priced (and crappy) "interface" that calling the dispatcher for a ride involved. Why didn't taxis create their own phone/internet hailing service? The same reason Al Gore's "information superhighway" was dead in the water. That is, the average abusive monopolist - like a local taxi company - could only look at the Internet and say "sounds all-right but I'm not lowering my price for that, I'm raising them web-design costs money".

Local taxi companies also weren't in a position to arrange to burn through millions and millions in cash from VCs.

Exactly. No Saudi prince would give $250k to some dude name Al with and his 10 car fleet.

In 2007 I had to drop my car off to get some work done. The plan was to take a taxi ~3 miles down a major road to my office, then taxi back up there at the end of the day.

Well it took three calls and about 90 minutes, but eventually someone showed up to drive me six minutes down the street in blistering 98F. It was more like 2 hours of standing outside baking in the sun to get someone to drive me to the shop at the end of the day. Turns out in my city (Dallas) taxis really only exist to drive to and from the airport. Worst case with ride-share companies, you're looking at ~30 min wait for an uber to arrive, with real-time updates if the driver feels like canceling, and auto-orders you another one.

Taxis work nothing like uber. If you are not traveling to/from a major sporting event, convention center or airport, the taxi does not want your business and will actively avoid/ignore you. For small, one-off trips like a coffee date, going to a concert, dropping your car off for service etc uber is great. Taxis absolutely do not want to be in that business. What this fight is about, is who is allowed to pick up/drop off at places like the airport, metallica concerts, apple wwdc etc.

In my market I can now get an taxi in more consistent time than an Uber. It seems drivers don’t get matched in a timely manner. Unfortunately I was using Uber primarily because of how fast it arrived previously, but the driver numbers fell off a lot during Covid, between some drivers churning out, not wanting to wear masks, and or switching to Uber eats.

Sometimes I wish I could just “even though there is so surge, I would gladly pay a 2x surge to just get a car to arrive here within the next 30 minutes”.

I've always thought much of the problems with Uber would be resolved by allowing the customer to bid higher for the trip.

Wouldn't that just encourage Uber drivers to be slow in picking up and wait for people to bid?

Yep, but it'd make Uber much more of a platform for negotiations between buyer and seller, which is what it kind of holds itself out to be.

But it would also encourage the Uber drivers to snipe each other as prices climbed.

> the car actually turns up in a timely manner

Here in Australia this is becoming a real problem with Uber - drivers seem to apparently have unlimited "cancels" and just cancel rides continuously to drive up demand especially at the airport where they know passengers have no other choice. They'll also almost always refuse rides that are too far, or don't finish in or near a high-demand area (like a CBD or airport). Other ride share apps are worse (DiDi really sucks), but Uber is the most expensive by far and the experience is pretty bad.

Our taxis on the other hand mostly seem to have uber-like apps and you can reliably get picked up just about anywhere even if you live in the middle of nowhere (within reason, of course). They're about the same price as Uber, with no surge pricing as well.

Did you read the article? You like Uber a lot, congrats, what does that have to do with this?

Exactly. Not see the forest for the trees.

I'm pretty convinced that these boilerplate responses are a result of PR brigading, which happens a lot in threads of this kind online. They always seem way too positively scripted, and they bury real comments.

The Internet is so overrun by engineered smoke and mirrors now, it's hard to trust even online comments concerning corporations unless they're negative comments concerning those corporations.

Even negative comments are just the competition's campaign

The best part about Uber/Lyft imo is that I know exactly how much I'll be charged before I even request it. Taxis you get to do a bunch of math that depends on factors like traffic but in the rideshare apps you can decide if the ride is worth it.

If taxis could replicate this more ethically, I would switch in a heartbeat.

They don't always stick to it. From LAX airport, it was showing an initial price of say $30, and then "looking for drivers" spinner goes on for 2-3 min. Then they "found" one that is more expensive, say $45, which you can accept to get "faster" service. Hint: you will have to wait ages to get that initial price, if at all.

Uber has become much more shitty AND much more expensive in the last years. Same with Lyft. I have a tingly feeling Lyft and Uber has struck a deal behind the curtain to not tread on each other, or fix prices.

I once took an Uber who didn't follow the directions of the app properly, missing some turns, resulting in unnecessary cycles. This resulted in the fare being higher than initially stated.

When I reported this to Uber, showing the trace in the map, they said the final price was still within the range stated (it was not), and nothing happened.

Uber varies dramatically in different locales.

In my area, they aren’t very available and don’t like to pick up in many areas, and hate driving to the airport or train station. Previously, the airport and train station authority held cabs to high standards there and they were responsive and clean.

In places like Boston I’ve been straight up stranded in the airport when Ubers just won’t show - don’t know why.

Another important benefit of taking an Uber is that the price is clear.

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