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Comment by ziml77 | Hacker News Reader

I learned within the past year that Uber sucks for drivers around NYC. The T&LC rules mean that someone who's not registered can't take pickups in NYC. They can still drop you off though, so Uber considers it valid to assign a non-T&LC vehicle to drive into NYC. Of course when that happens, the driver has an empty car going back the other way. It's awful for their pay and a big waste of energy and road space.

Some drivers will just deal with it, but many end up asking if you're going into NYC. If you're lucky they will cancel the ride immediately, but if not then you have to wait for them to drive by your pickup spot before canceling the ride (which I have to assume is so they can say that they couldn't find you).

When I do need a car into the city and it's serviced by a non-T&LC driver, I now make sure to leave a huge tip to make up for Uber not giving drivers an option to not be matched with people going into NYC.

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It also sucks for the riders and I really can't imagine Uber likes the situation either.

It's a really annoying situation because you end up arguing with some driver over text or worse in person about it.

They don't want to cancel because cancelling a lot impacts their rating with uber and they will get less rides.

I don't want to cancel because after a few minutes I'll be charged a cancellation fee and now I have to start all over with another driver and a dice-roll if i'll get another driver who refuses to go to NYC again. If I want my $5 back I also have to argue with some AI customer service rep for an hour.

Terrible user experience.

Lyft seems to do better with assigning only TLC cars to NYC rides, but, not 100% -- Uber also biases towards TLC cars for NYC routes but there isn't always one available of course so sometimes you get assigned another one, just anecdotally Lyft seems to get you a TLC car more often.

TLC are the only ones winning here.

> It also sucks for the riders and I really can't imagine Uber likes the situation either.

I think the question is what does Uber do when it doesn't like a situation? Does it try to create the best user experience given the constraints, or does it make the situation shitty for everyone except themselves (maybe until it can force whatever change best serves Uber's interests, nevermind anyone else)?

It sounds like it's totally within Uber's capabilities to make this situation better (add a "TLC car" flag to their system, and only use those cars for NYC rides), so why have they chosen not to do that?

Question is how many of these needs to be added for all the rogue cities

> Question is how many of these needs to be added for all the rogue cities

"Rogue cities," seriously? I've seen some twisted propaganda ("PR") in my life, but that takes the cake.

Help me understand this as I'm not in NY and I use uber about 2-3 times a year. When you use Uber you put in your destination up-front - so everyone already knows where you are and where you're going, why isn't this information used by drivers to make a decision on whether or not to accept?

Evidently it varies by region how much information about the destination is given to the drivers.

You are describing an example of how Uber works in your region. That is not how it works in every jurisdiction. Uber often hides information from drivers to prevent them from choosing only profitable rides. Other gig companies do the same thing.

Uber drivers have been able to see the approximate destination before accepting the ride for over a year now in all markets.

Yeah, which is why it's confusing that my mom had two drivers reject her the last time she needed to get to the airport when I wasn't able to give her a ride to JFK.

Wow, we've gone full circle. I remember when being able to reliably get an Uber to JFK was a selling point over taxis.

Isn't there a subway connection or something? I mean, it is an international airport and a big city...

Taking the subway with potentially heavy check-in bags isn’t always possible. I wouldn’t say it’s the most convenient trip and I can understand why someone would prefer an Uber or taxi option.

It's always possible, just rarely preferred and almost never easy.

The US has bizarre funding rules that made it effectively impossible to have a through ride from municipal public transport to the airport until recently.

LMFAO welcome to New York.

We have three major large scale airports, and none of them are connected to the subway. It would be comical if it wasn’t so sad.

That's not really true.

You can take the subway to JFK -- it's the A train. Or even faster, take the LIRR. For both, you have to transfer to the AirTrain for the last short stretch, but that train brings you directly to each terminal so you'd need to get on it anyways.

And you can take NJ Transit light rail from Penn Station to Newark, it's 3 stops. It's not technically the subway -- but it's better because it goes faster and there are less stops.

LaGuardia is the only airport you can't get to by train -- there was an attempt [1] but it was cancelled last year. But one of the big reasons for cancellation is that it was crazy expensive and you can already get to the airport pretty easily if you're willing to hop on bus connection from the subway or LIRR.

So I'd say the situation isn't that sad. For Newark and JFK it's totally fine, and for LaGuardia you just need to add a bus.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirTrain_LaGuardia

Yeah no. You can take the subway to a LIRR station called Jamaica or a parking lot in Howard Beach. Neither is actually at the airport let alone within a mile of an actual check in counter.

NJ transit isn’t a subway, and even so you still can’t take it to Newark Airport. You can get off a mile or two from the nearest terminal. Utterly inexplicably, the PATH train, which is reasonably described as a subway system, stops an entire stop short of even doing that, despite the tracks continuing onwards to that AirTrain station.

Once you get off each of these subways, in a location that is near to, but definitely not in, an airport, you may choose to take a slow and oddly expensive rubber wheeled bus that sort of is a monorail (and is certainly not a subway) device onwards to a terminal.

And of course at LaGuardia you can’t do even that.

So yes, it is “really true” that you can’t take the fucking subway to the airport.

All you have to is try it, get off the subway, and then ask “am I in an airport now?” and if the answer is no then you’ve figured out the problem.

You're being unreasonably pedantic.

What does it matter whether it's technically a "subway" train or a train that is not technically a "subway" but works the same?

The point is, you can take the train to two of NYC's three major airports.

(And no, AirTrains are not buses. That's a bizarre and false thing to say. They're trains.)

The difference is that the subway is the main transit mode. OP is very reasonably complaining that every reasonable public transit option to NYC airports is multi agency and multi modal.

Most major cities I've been to have a train to the airport that is not part of the regular subway system. That requires a different type of ticket, etc.

This is especially because airports are frequently further out from a city than the subway system goes -- you need light rail.

But the A train is a subway that actually connects directly to the AirTrain which goes around the terminals at JFK.

So I don't think it's a reasonable complaint that you have to connect to an AirTrain that goes around the terminals, or that getting to Newark requires NJ Transit instead of MTA. This is entirely normal.

Also, the subway is not "the main" transit mode. For a huge proprotion of people in the metropolitan area, they rely just as much on NJ Transit, PATH, LIRR, and even Metro-North.

LaGuardia is honestly the only one that's annoying, because the connecting bus is more annoying.

Maybe it's not a bus, but it definitely ain't a train either. It's about as fast as, and the same capacity as, a standard MTA articulated bus.

I think the proper term is people mover. I might suggest "amusement park ride" as an accurate description as well.

Either way it fucking sucks. Go to continental Europe some time if you want to see examples of how to run local transit into airports.

It's literally a train. It runs on a track.

Big deal if it doesn't run as fast as you'd like. That doesn't make it not a train.

Also, MTA buses run at a normal vehicle speed. So I don't even know what you're complaining about. You really need to get to your terminal, what, 5 minutes faster? You need a bullet train between terminals or something?

Yes I know what trains in Europe are like. You're changing the subject. Your point seemed to be that NYC airports aren't connected to convenient public train transportation, but the fact is that 2 out of 3 of them are.

Even if it's not technically the MTA subway itself that is the train that brings you directly to your terminal. Still, quite literally, 100%, a train.

The US has a peculiar bit of transit bureaucracy that (until 2021) made it difficult to fund integrating airports into wider transit networks. Airports could charge fees to passengers to fund transportation improvements, but only if those transit networks were exclusively for transit to and from the airport, so you couldn't just add a subway stop. JFK, for example, has its own train ("Airtrain JFK") that goes from a near-ish subway station to the airport.

That makes it take more than an hour on transit (including ~2 transfers and 15 mins of walking) to get from Grand Central Station to JFK. It also costs more than $10 total, as opposed to the $3 that a subway ride costs.

Yes, but my mother doesn't live in New York proper, and getting there via public transit would require, uh, I think four different things? Bus to the train to the subway to the airtrain.

Some drivers just don't like going to airports. It's not that confusing. It's possible that the fact they could see the destination is precisely why the rejected it.

Maybe I don't understand how Uber works, but why would they have accepted it to begin with?

Drivers are often assigned their next ride while they are still dropping off their current passenger(s), so if they are a good driver they won't look at the details of the next ride until they have dropped off their current passenger(s). Once they are stopped and able to safely look at their device again, they can at that point decide they don't want the next ride. At that point, the app has to play roulette to find another driver.

Why don't drivers want to go to the airport?

If you didn't have to go to the airport, would you want to go? Taking a single rider to the airport chews up a lot of time OR you can possibly pick up multiple shorter rides in the same span of time without having to deal with an airport.

But there are ALWAYS people looking for rides to AND from the airport. And they're generally good long rides.

And some people like licorice. Not really sure the point you're trying to make.

> in all markets.

I am an Uber driver. I do not see the approximate destination prior to pickup. I don't know what percentage of Uber markets actually have that feature.

You're very confident about this, aren't you?

Uber could certainly throw additional tech at this problem, but, realistically, the problem is the fault of NYC, not Uber. If NYC got rid of their antiquated laws, this would be a non-issue, and, rides would likely be cheaper and easier to obtain.

Not to mention you really don't want big names like Uber/Lyft to be the only players that can enter the game because they have the resources to enter a complex regulatory market.

> Uber could certainly throw additional tech at this problem, but, realistically, the problem is the fault of NYC, not Uber. If NYC got rid of their antiquated laws, this would be a non-issue, and, rides would likely be cheaper and easier to obtain.

No, you've got it ass-backwards. It's Uber's job to provide the best customer experience given their constraints, it's not NYC's job to bend over backwards to adapt its laws to Uber's model.

The problem is the fault of Uber.

> Not to mention you really don't want big names like Uber/Lyft to be the only players that can enter the game because they have the resources to enter a complex regulatory market.

It sounds the additional tech required to "enter a complex regulatory market" is a boolean flag.

>No, you've got it ass-backwards. It's Uber's job to provide the best customer experience given their constraints, it's not NYC's job to bend over backwards to adapt its laws to Uber's model.

>The problem is the fault of Uber.

Are you claiming that the government can do no wrong regardless of what laws they pass?

> Are you claiming that the government can do no wrong regardless of what laws they pass?

I'm not claiming that, but I agree it is an Uber problem. Uber chose to enter this market knowing the rules in advance. They didn't petition the system to get an exception to operate as they wanted, they just "disrupted" and did what they wanted operating under the ask for forgiveness not permission mindset. If you're not going to play by the rules, you don't get to cry to your mummy about the rules being unfair.

>I'm not claiming that, but I agree it is an Uber problem. Uber chose to enter this market knowing the rules in advance.

but the law in question (ie. the one mandating minimum pay for workers) were passed in 2023, well after they entered the market? Moreover, despite all the vague gesturing that they broke some sort of existing law, I'm not aware of any successful lawsuits against them[1]. At best you could argue that the broke the spirit of the regulations.

[1] from wikipedia: Taxi companies sued Uber in numerous American cities, alleging that Uber's policy of violating taxi regulations was a form of unfair competition or a violation of antitrust law.[80] Although some courts did find that Uber intentionally violated the taxi rules, Uber prevailed in every case, including the only case to proceed to trial.[81]

T&LC = New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission

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