Comment by smokey_the_bear | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smokey_the_bear | Hacker News Reader

smokey_the_bear

We started using Uber this year to get to the airport. Though we are happy with the price, and very happy with the ease of scheduling, every single ride has made me uncomfortable with the safety and comfort of the service.

Over four rides to the airport this year, these things have happened:

1) Three of the times the drivers claimed the AC wasn't working, and we had to drive on the interstate with the windows down.

2) The driver missed the exit for SFO, and drove through the median to get to it

3) Two drivers did not know how to get to OAK

4) I (a pregnant woman) was traveling alone with my infant son. Driver did not help load stroller and luggage into the trunk. Threw luggage out of the trunk onto the curb when we arrived at the airport.

Transportation always kind of sucks, and maybe this is the best you can buy for $72 from Berkeley to SFO. My Uber experiences have been uniformly worse than my taxi to/from airport experiences. But they are slightly cheaper and easier to schedule.

This is the problem with Uber.

Most drivers, don't give two shits about the job. And it's hard to blame most of them if you understand the dispatcher-model they generally work under. It's very cut-throat and has high pressures.

While this isn't an excuse on Uber's part, I think it's where Uber can step in and improve things. Originally Uber's goal was too make Taxi's an app. They've succeeded with that. Now they need to improve quality, and not necessary the quality of the app, but the drivers. They have to force a cultural shift through an antiquated market, where education levels are highly variable. They should test a drivers knowledge about Uber and ensure they know what customer expect in terms of service. On the flip side, it should be very clear to the customer what they should expect in terms of service.

They also need to improve there mechanism for feedback. They need this because they must force out bad drivers. It's single handily ruining their reputation.

Uber is great, the drivers are variable.

All that said, I live in a city and almost completely replaced my taxi usage with an eBike, so I hardly use the app anymore, but when I was a regular user (10-20 rides a month). Classical dispatching companies were much more reliable then Uber.

Uber claims [1] they have a "series of rigorous screening tests, including a background check, an in-person screening, a city knowledge exam, and other ongoing quality controls".

If true, that would seem to address your point about screening driver quality. But a number of people are reporting drivers who don't really know their way around the city, which suggests (if those reports are true) that the city-knowledge exam is either not rigorous enough, or somehow not testing the right thing.

[1] http://blog.uber.com/2013/02/25/uber-sf-to-add-more-drivers-...

I guess the problem is work ethic then, no follow through.

Which is why a feedback system is critical: bad drivers need to be expunged from the system, IMO.

EDIT: Perhaps undercover employees would be a good mechanism to flush out these drivers.

Even if you have a perfect city knowledge exam, how do you ensure the guy driving the car is the guy who passed the exam?

London has been using The Knowledge for 150 years, it's a solved problem.

To replicate that, though, Uber would also have to replicate some of the state apparatus around it, which they may or may not be able to do (or even want to do, ideologically). The London exam is effective in part because it's backed by law: it's illegal to drive a taxi if you haven't passed a licensing exam, and it's also illegal for someone who is properly licensed to lend out their credentials to a friend who'll pick up some people on their behalf, while the licensed driver takes the day off. And as you make the exam more rigorous, those counter-pressures increase, so if Uber had an actually rigorous knowledge exam, they would also have huge levels of cheating if there were no attempt at serious enforcement.

Uber could try to institute both a rigorous knowledge exam, and a high level of enforcement of the rule that only people who actually passed it may drive cars under Uber's name. But they would need some credible way of doing that, like roving undercover inspectors.

You could have the app send you a picture of the person who should be picking you up. The user could then report if someone else comes to pick them up. The only problem I'd see is that it might make riders uncomfortable if it is someone different, they might not want to cause a scene or any sort of confrontation, and they want to get to their destination, but they also wouldn't want to ride with someone unlicensed.

So I'm not sure exactly how you'd get around that problem. Maybe you give people who report that they have a different driver say $20 credit, and the ride is free or something. Of course then you'll have people trying to cheat the system.

Seems like a good place to use biometrics.

Thats the thing tho, drivers have always been variable. Even before Uber. A lot of taxi dispatching companies get a lot of flack, but most have always been able to provide good service. All uber did was automate the job that is done by call takers. They havent really done much to improve the real problem in the taxi industry, which is unreliable drivers that constantly drop calls or act rude.

> 2) The driver missed the exit for SFO, and drove through the median to get to it

I have never made that SFO exit & had to drive through the median every single time. Been to SFO about a half dozen times this past year. The signs to that SFO exit aren't really in sync with the actual exit...you sort of have to know where the SFO exit is & ignore the sign. Even when I mentally make a note to do that, sometimes the sign confuses me & I end up missing the exit.

True, but that's only what you'd expect a noob to do. I have never had an actual taxi driver make that mistake, because the airport, of all places, is somewhere a taxi driver can get to in their sleep.

Which type of Uber did you use? Uber Taxi, Uber X, or the black cars?

If you called Uber Taxi, I believe the taxi drivers are paid less than if you were to call a normal taxi.

With UberXs and the black cars, I've always had great experiences and at least 50% of the time they'd offer me water, open my door, and sometimes have candy available.

We used UberX everytime.

I must be very inexperienced - what's the problem with driving on the interstate with the windows down?

Road wind. At 40+ mph, a car with open windows is noisy and uncomfortable.

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