Demand and ETR Forecasting at Airports | Hacker News Reader

Demand and ETR Forecasting at Airports

uber.com

26 pointsriadsila13 comments

How about getting estimated wait times for pickup for riders even remotely correct? That helps drivers too:

Recently I had a severely delayed flight that didn't land until after 1am, and was by far the last flight into my podunk airport. My apps showed a 3 minute pickup time from Uber and a 20 minute time from Lyft, so I booked a ride with Uber. After 3-5 minutes of "this is taking longer than expected", it finally found a driver, and the pickup time wound up being 20 minutes (just like Lyft). So I cancelled and got into a waiting cab and was home by the time the Uber would have picked me up.

If Uber would have just been honest about the pickup time, I would have never booked a ride and would not have wasted some poor driver's time when he got the ride request. This also delayed me by 3-5 minutes (the matching time on the app), which irritated me. I'm gradually being conditioned to not trust Uber, and to just use Lyft and Taxis..

This is such bullshit. I’m sure they A/B test and find that outright lies helped with whatever metrics. However I too don’t trust the apps, including Lyft, to represent pickup times at all accurately. That’s assuming good faith on the drivers, which I’ve found to be very dubious.

> One way to tackle this undersupply/oversupply issue

...is to pay the drivers while they are working for you. While waiting for fares, they're not free to do whatever, and should thus be compensated. That Uber won't pay their drivers while they're working seems criminal.

Are there any taxi-like systems anywhere in the world that pay drivers for idle waiting time?

In finland taxi drivers are regular salaried workers earning hourly wage during working hours regardless if they have customers or not and they may earn additionally provision of sales. Caveat here is that some taxies are self-employed which makes the situation bit more complicated

uh, pay them a monthly wage for doing 9-5 and the drivers would drive as much or as less, what the app makes them work

The question stands: are there any taxi-like systems that work like that? Traditional taxies certainly did not employ their drivers and pay them a wage, they were still very much working for their fares.

Hired cars sometimes pay their employees that way (the driver gets $/hr no matter what), hence you have to schedule well in advance.

They are free to do whatever though. A lot of them eat or talk to family on the phone or exercise or read or whatever while waiting in staging lots.

Cities like NYC require meeting certain utilization numbers which result in partially paying for time waiting for trips. The result of that has been that drivers are forced offline and to leave the airport when there’s an oversupply of drivers.

If that were the case, droves of drivers would just head to the airport to relax in their car and watch youtube videos.

It would require uber to actually tell drivers where to go, which it doesn't do right now. Basically, completely change the model currently used.

Hypothetically if drivers were salaried, wouldn't uber have even greater motivation for implementing this sort of system?

The post lacks performance metrics, so it is impossible to know if their effort was worth it. It would be improved by explaining how performance is assessed and why their method is better than an existing or much simpler (e.g., rules-based) baseline.

How useful would it be to Uber for me to tell them I’m arriving at X and will use Uber? Enough for a small discount?

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