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Comment by Forgeties79 | Hacker News Reader

In a city?

Cabs, busses, bikes, trains...

Don't be intentionally obtuse - even for people living in a place with public transport as encompassing as say NYC, you _need_ some form of ride-sharing service eventually in day-to-day life. Being banned from the duopoly of ride-share services is a life-altering thing to happen.

though the commenter might have been obtuse to say that banned from the duopoly of ride-share services is a life-altering thing to happen is quite mad. I live in a city and have never used a ride-share service. out the pool of another dozen friends/co-workers 10 of them seldom-to-never use it (we are all in 40's / early 50's). so most definitely not "life-altering thing"

Have you ever considered that perhaps others conduct themselves differently?

I live in a small city. When I travel, I generally have to be at the airport or train station between 4 and 530 AM. Uber put the taxis out of business, so the choice is Uber, Lyft, wasting a half hour and alot of money parking, or trying to find a black car service.

I was in Rome for business. The choice is Uber or the local cab hailing app, which the cabs don’t always respond to, and the cabbie frequently tries to ripoff a dopey foreigner.

Heh, Rome!! The meter wrote €40, the taxi driver asked for €60. He tried verbal-aggression and threatened to call the police. I took a photo of the meter and asked him to please call the police, I will show them the photo and tell them that he threatened me. He took the €40 and went his merry way.

Once upon a time (around 2005-2006) I had a colleague whose father was a taxi driver. He (the colleague) was openly telling us that every cabbie cheats. Once in a blue moon you find an honest one, or one whose cheating-meter-subsystem is broken.

Cabbies and barmen. My family owned bars, my grand uncle always said he would fire honest bartenders, because there’s no such thing, and he’s too smart to work for him. :)

geeeeez, you guys are making it sound like going to Rome is like going to ____ ( I don’t want to offend any City here… :) ).

Oh no, don't get me wrong, it's a magical place and I had a wonderful time there a few times!

I had a great time there, but maybe that’s because I never used a cab.

I used cabs, not any different than using cabs anywhere else.

Have you ever considered that perhaps others conduct themselves differently?

I have, the commenter I replied to hasn’t :)

I don’t think I was being obtuse. We had ways of getting around before Uber existed. It’s literally just taxis in another format, which we still have.

Like you said I can’t think of a single place we’re not having access to Uber means that you are functionally stuck. I’m sure those locations exist, but they must be quite rare. There are a lot of places with the others that don’t have Uber, however.

> even for people living in a place with public transport as encompassing as say NYC, you _need_ some form of ride-sharing service eventually in day-to-day life

Not really. You can say this about smaller US cities, but NYC is absolutely a city where the >90% percentile of people can live without the daily use of a car.

(The simplest reason for this has nothing do to with car ownership or desirability per se: it's because of NYC's food delivery happens by bike or moped.)

Not true.

Many times, if I want to go from arbitrary point A to point B in NYC within 30 minutes due to time constraints, the only choice is taxi/Lyft/Uber. Subway/bus combined with walking easily take 1 hour.

Or when it's very late in the evening.

Of course, we are talking about NYC, which means that you can arrive at your destination, eventually. That doesn't mean you want to do that in many situations.

This is a strawman if I've ever seen one. The person you're responding to said literally nothing about "daily use of a car". The point was that you need rideshare at some point in your life, which is a point you failed to respond to. There are trips, even in NYC, where you'd be severely inconveniencing yourself by not using rideshare, which makes it a tough calculus to choose between $20 and being banned from Uber for life.

I didn't see the "eventually" before "day-to-day." But I also quoted it, so this is a reading comprehension error on my part, not a strawman.

I’m not being obtuse and that’s a very rude thing to say. No need to personally attack me. I get I was being somewhat flippant, but the point is that anywhere that has rideshare almost certainly has at least some other option(s). We would be very hard-pressed to find a place where literally the only option is Uber.

What do you mean? You can easily get by without ride share in NYC. Not everyone even has a cell phone.

I wonder how it was possible to live before ride sharing services. Like common, they are convenient, but not a life necessity. In a city with a good public transport, taxi usage was rare.

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