Hacker News Reader

Comment by johncessna | Hacker News Reader

This used to be very common in the US especially around airports where drivers wait for up to an hour to get a fare and want to make sure it's worth the wait. It may still be happening, but I just go straight for the cab to avoid the hassle.

View on HN

The US airport rideshare model (if you even want to call a largely emergent phenomenon that) must be one of the most wasteful things in transportation ever.

Why do I have to wait for, and find, my specific Uber/Lyft out of a sea of otherwise identical ones that are all in each other's way, all while idling and wasting tons of fuel? (I know that the legal answer is "taxi medallions"; that doesn't make it any less absurd.)

1. You pick the kind of car you want (sedan, SUV, luxury, with a child seat, pet friendly, EV).

2. The driver can choose the areas they want to drive in.

3. Cars can wait in an airport parking lot until they are needed and not crowd the terminal.

It is a perfectly efficient model.

> 1. You pick the kind of car you want (sedan, SUV, luxury, with a child seat, pet friendly, EV).

I'd be willing to pay extra to just get whatever car is right there. I really couldn't care less about most of these modes, and I doubt that the vast majority of other passengers do either (maybe with the exception of a child seat).

> It is a perfectly efficient model.

You've clearly never been to JFK then.

JFK is a mess because it cannot accommodate the amount of traffic it gets. And you want to add thousands of Ubers standing at the gate waiting for passengers?

> I'd be willing to pay extra to just get whatever car is right there

So then just go to the taxi stand? Why even call an Uber?

What would be so hard about allowing a new Uber/Lyft in for each leaving one, physically or logically?

Uber/Lyft could allocate the "new car in" slots using whatever mechanism they currently use to match riders to drivers.

Having to find "my" car is just completely backwards in the airport scenario, at least at times of high usage.

Because cars aren't allowed to idle at the terminal. They wait in a queue in the parking lot until they are matched, and then come pick you up. Yes this means you have to wait a couple minutes extra, but airports enforce this rule for a reason.

> airports enforce this rule for a reason.

What is that reason, and why are things handled so differently for taxis?

Have you tried writing to your local airport authority and asking them the reason? Or are you automatically assuming that there's a grand conspiracy at play against you?

In most cases it's a simple capacity problem. Taxis have to be hailed physically, and there are already reserved taxi stands at every airport. There's no reason for that to change.

I don't think this is a conspiracy at all, just a pretty standard case of an incumbent getting preferential treatment (why else do taxis get a reserved taxi stand, but Uber/Lyft don't?) and an "innovator" disrupting at any cost and externalizing the consequences (in this case congestion throughout the terminal and surrounding streets).

A more efficient stable state is clearly not being reached through market forces, but since there will never be agreement on whether that's due to too little (get rid of the medallions!) or too much market liberalization (ban the rideshares!!), and the only thing everybody can agree on is that a public transit solution is impossible, I don't see any way out.

What.

I've never heard anything this stupid.

I've only encountered the following two airport systems:

1) There's a queue of taxis and people coming out go to the first one.

2) There's a queue of people, and an airport person tells you when you can go to the next taxi.

Depending on whether there's too many people or too many taxis.

Uber/Lyft's system is that taxis wait in a (virtual) queue in an airport parking lot, and when you request one they come to the terminal to pick you up.

Yeah, and that's arguably absurd. It creates dozens of people and dozens of cars all in each other's way. It's complete and utter chaos I've not experienced in any other country.

No, that's not how it works. The ride share drivers wait in a parking lot near the airport. Then when you hail one using the app they come pick you up in a designated zone. The app notifies you when your car arrives and you can check the license plate. It works fine most of the time, there's very little chaos. Have you ever even been to a US airport?

> Have you ever even been to a US airport?

Yes, I travel to/from US airports all the time. This is based on my personal experiences there.

Admittedly, there are some where it does work a bit better (NYC does seem to be particularly bad, but fortunately at least JFK has the AirTrain; EWR seems to be giving up on theirs).

But all in all, the experience is notably worse than in most other countries I've been to.

Some states seem to not require front plates which makes it extra annoying. Especially if I'm bad at identifying vehicle models (I basically only use Uber/Lyft when I travel for work to get to my hotel in cities with shitty or nonexistent public transport...)

> I've never heard anything this stupid.

I may be misunderstanding your comment, but you're saying you've never heard of online rideshare apps like Uber and Lyft?

Maybe GP has just never taken one to/from the airport? It's really not that common to do that in many places outside of the US. In many European cities, public transit is often the fastest way to get to/from the city center from an airport.

Elsewhere, Uber is just not great compared to taxis, and supply can be minimal:

I've had to take an Uber recently for work [1] , and I effectively had a choice between one driver that would ask me to please cancel from my side because they didn't want to go to the airport, and another driver already at the airport (with Uber blatantly lying that they'd be here to pick me up in "10 minutes", when the ride takes 30 without traffic).

[1] Expensing a taxi invoice is more of a hassle. On top of that, often the card terminal mysteriously and completely unexpectedly breaks down at the end of the ride in taxis in some places, and expensing cash payments is even harder.

> In many European cities, public transit is often the fastest way to get to/from the city center from an airport.

Yeah, exactly.

When friends or family go to the airport, I drive them.

When I go to the airport, I take the metro. It's a 5 minute walk from home, and the metro stops inside the airport.

Yes, I've heard of them.

But they were banned in my country years ago.

Taxis and humans queue up against each other in the countries I've went to.

I think the answer is more that Uber has externalized the cost of all that waste.

Why do they care about increased traffic and increased pollution if they aren't the ones hiring extra staties to manage the chaos?

Given that Uber isn't charging (and by extension isn't earning anything) on the time drivers spend to get to the pick up point, I doubt that they don't have any economic interest in doing something better than the status quo.

I think this really is an artifact of the taxi medallion system which regulates private car transportation differently depending on the way you hail it, for largely historical reasons. (Taxis that you can just flag down used to be much more profitable, to the point where a license for that used to go for more than a million USD in NYC.)

Uber/Ola at Indian airports do not actually assign you specific driver/car. You are given a PIN & asked to go queue at the relevant counter (Premier, Electric, XL, Go etc). You just get into the car then, tell your PIN & the ride starts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com