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Lyft for Work

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193 pointssinak64 comments

Maybe they should actually find people who know how to drive first. I'm getting sick of these ridershares and their terrible drivers. I'm strictly speaking in San Francisco. It's ridiculous how many times they randomly stop in the middle of the street to pick someone up causing traffic jams or even stopping at a stop sign to drop or pick someone up. Plus all the illegal U-turns and crossing double yellow lines when they're not supposed to. I don't recall having this issue with cabs. It's almost unbearable to drive in the city now.

Two days ago, my Lyft driver in LA started driving backwards on a busy street because he missed a turn; people were honking and stuff.

What did you rate him?

99 red balloons

5/5, sorry... I don't have a great explanation why. I think it has something to do with personal interaction. If it was over Ebay or something I wouldn't worry about giving low rating, but when I meet someone face to face and they are nice, then it's hard to rate low.

It's funny - because I've done the same thing. I've had drivers that hit the brakes way too hard, and were kind of annoyingly chatty - that I just didn't have the heart to downgrade, even though I realized that I probably hadn't had a great experience, and, they weren't the safest of drivers. But I just couldn't bring myself to give a black mark to someone who had tried so hard to be friendly.

Don't you rate drivers on Lyft? Shouldn't the rating system take care of this?

It sounds like titlex is another road user and not a Lyft customer. I think you have to be a customer to give a driver a rating.

It takes care of it the same way voting takes care of bad politicians in democracies.

I'll echo that for DC. If you don't know how to get from the watergate to union station via the most efficient route, or you have no business driving a cab.

This is the second time I've seen you complain about this trip. I lived near the Watergate hotel for several years and can tell you there is no automatic guaranteed efficient route to union station. The entirety of downtown dc and all of the monuments lie directly between those two endpoints. DC traffic can snarl up pretty quickly between the tourists and random motorcades and regular old downtown traffic. I'd cut them some slack.

I take the trip every day so I have a lot of data points. There is an efficient route to Union station from the Watergate that's almost never backed up: take Rock Creek Parkway, to Independence Ave, to I-395, exit 10 to D Street. You can be forgiven for taking Constitution, but if you take K or H, you're guaranteed to be stuck in traffic.

People who don't take this route, I imagine, either don't know Rock Creek Parkway opens to southbound traffic at 6:30 pm (I travel at 6:35), or don't know that while 395 is a mess on the VA side, it's usually clear sailing for the short stretch from Independence to D street. This isn't obscure. Rock Creek Parkway and 395 are the only freeways running across D.C. Anyone who is a professional driver should be intimately familiar with the traffic patterns on these two roads. At the very least, you shouldn't need me to give you turn-by-turns after telling you to take this route across the city.

Do DC taxi drivers ever take this route for you? My limited experience in DC taxis was not ideal.

I'd say 75% at least ask if I want to take Rock Creek Parkway (though yesterday, one got lost and took me to Virginia...) These are old guys who hang around the Kennedy Center/Watergate all day. I'd say it's flipped for ride-sharing services, where the driver almost always relies on the GPS (I take it Uber's GPS isn't very good--Waze suggests the correct route).

This is what I was wondering, Waze/Google has been unexpectedly good, I thought Uber might have less than amazing GPS.

I've noticed this on multiple occasions: Uber has pretty terrible built-in GPS. It almost always has my drivers taking the larger/busier roads even though they are less direct and more congested than side streets. It's like when Google Maps gives you the three possible routes, Uber often picks the equivalent of that weird third route that makes no sense.

Uber GPS is fucking terrible. It always suggests alleys in downtown DC.

It's called 'disruption' and is very hip in the Bay these days...

Out of the four Lyft rides I've done so far all of the drivers were nice and didn't violate any laws. That said, none of them knew the streets very well and even with GPS I had to direct two or three of them. I've even heard of some drivers claiming it's good way to get to know a city. It should be the other way around, you know then city and then drive for Lyft.

My experience is the exact opposite. Cabbies in the city act like they could do whatever they want on the road, whereas Lyft and Uber drivers are way more cautious.

Same here - tons of cabs just hog the road like it's their priviledge to park there.

I don't see lyft drivers doing this.... but then how do you know lyft drivers are even hogging the road? Even if they have the purple mustache then it's in the front. Uber?

Driving in San Francisco was always so pleasant too

We should look at the bigger picture though, past our subjective preferences.

Lyft/Uber should be exciting from a business perspective to the HN community because it represents a business model that has been uniquely enabled by changes in the landscape. Ten years ago, this business wouldn't work, but the rise of the smartphone, and then GPS implicitly enabled this entire new segment. People, for better or worse, no longer need to be trained taxi drivers to drive people around the city because of smartphone GPS.

The more interesting conversation is about how this trend could have been anticipated.

You've been able to use a phone to call a cab for a lot longer than 10 years.

I think mmxiii is saying that the phone+GPS combo has enabled people to become cab drivers, not to summon them. Previously, you'd either have to either be very familiar with geography, or purchase a GPS unit - probably not very expensive, but still an investment for a very part-time job.

In NYC, cabbies & Uber seem equally bad.

Flycleaners seems like the worst, though. They must put their drivers on unrealistic schedules that force them to drive like maniacs. They run red lights and swing around corners and high speeds and idle in bike lanes in packs.

Many startups in SF already offer a reimbursement for work related travel but many employees don't follow up on it due to the inconvenience involved. This is a really good idea and I wonder how long until Uber announces the same.

Uber actually came out with "Uber for Business" at the end of July:

https://www.uber.com/business

http://blog.uber.com/business (the blog post announcing it)

I had a feeling they did but my quick search didn't turn anything up. Thanks.

Uber business is a good approach. But you'll get individual bills for every trip.

I hope Lyft gets you one consolidated bill a month for the company.

This is the worst part in using Uber for a company. They won't consolidate on a monthly invoice (like most B2B vendors) so you end up with hundreds of Uber transactions on your credit card statement. It's a real pain to manage.

I disagree. In my personal case, I need to individually account for each of those rides when I file reimbursement. A month does not capture that the first week was billable to client x, the second week was work related travel, Monday I was taking a prospective around, etc. individual transactions let me group them by which expense report they belong in.

Maybe this is not true for everyone tho.

This offering is similar to Uber Perks , which uber has had for a couple years..

Is this really that common, an employer offering free taxi credits? I've worked at a handful of software companies in SF, and I don't recall any of them doing this.

Yeah it is.

I've also seen it at big end of town. Large corporates can offer transportation to employees that are required to work late – e.g. on a large systems release.

Yep, this is common

If you use public transport you get a taxi home after hours.

And the evening pizza usually, but that's more common.

It's big in New York.

Read The Devil Wears Prada. (It's in the movie, but discussed at length in the book.)

It's also common for employees taking business trips. At least in Europe.

Well, here in Brisbane it's definitely offered by a number of agencies I've worked at.

> Is this really that common, an employer offering free taxi credits?

Yes, employers paying for work-related expenses is common (and generally required in California, see Labor Code Sec. 2802), and taxi as the employer-preferred form for local work-related transportation (as opposed to the employee driving a personal or employer-provided vehicle and being reimbursed for mileage) is often preferred for various reasons, most especially liability.

I haven't seen an employer offer "credits"; however I've had no trouble expensing an Uber or Lyft ride.

no IE9 support, and showing a blank page with this message "Hey! Your browser is not supported, certain pages may not render correctly! Try updating your browser at http://browsehappy.com . " ? Many people like me don't have a choice.

The whole Lyft site shows nothing without Javascript enabled. Even the title is set via script.

Google indexed titles and content for all pages though. How are they doing that? Are the delivering different content based on ip or useragent or something?

Google crawlers have been able to execute javascript since at least May of this year[0].

[0] http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2014/05/understand...

Interesting. The content must have changed recently then. Because I see different text in the Google serps then on the page with js enabled.

For lyft.com Google shows me "Lyft is your friend with a car" which is not on the page.

For lyft.com/stories Google shows "Discover extraordinary stories from the Lyft community" which is also not on the page.

Maybe it's from good old metatags. The have some, but somehow they apply a scripting engine (angular?) to them:

    <meta property="og:title" content="{{meta.title || 'A ride whenever you need one' }}{{meta.signoff || ' - Lyft'}}">

The "Discover extraordinary stories" text is not in the metatags though.

they dont necessarily give the google bot this version of the page. its perfectly ok to prerender the page with something like phantomjs and send the crawler the prerendered pages. this was , to my knowledge, quite common with angularjs apps that relied heavily on seo/google juice.

Google crawlers have been able to execute javascript since at least May of this year[0].

As I wrote in another comment, that hasn't stopped Google requested pages via _escaped_fragment_.

Googlebot has been executing some limited amount of JS for some time. See http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/11/get-post-...

Google crawlers execute Javascript [1] since this year. Before that you apparently had to deliver a pre-rendered page to the crawler. I don't know anything about the lyft stack, but there are solutions for SEO with Single-Page Apps (see e.g. [2]).

[1]: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.no/2014/05/understand...

[2]: http://www.yearofmoo.com/2012/11/angularjs-and-seo.html

Google crawlers execute Javascript [1] since this year. Before that you apparently had to deliver a pre-rendered page to the crawler.

For what it's worth, Google and Bing both still make _escaped_fragment_ requests to our AngularJS site.

I'm not sure if this means that Google prefer prerendered views over the standard website. For now, it seems sensible to implement.

Google crawlers do index javascript now as many people have already pointed out.

The other common practice is to use a "prerender" server which uses a tool like phantomjs to render the HTML of the page. When googlebot or any other robot hits your http server, you check the useragent, and if it matches known robots you forward the request to prerender instead of your app server.

The prerendering might be in place here. When you set your useragent to Googlebot, you get a page with tons of html. Still nothing readable though. The textcontent Google indexed is not in the body of this but in the metatags. Strange. They could have put it in the metatags independent of the useragent, right?

Looks like they're following Google's guidelines[1], and passing an "_escaped_fragment_" parameter returns a pre-rendered view.

Compare the source of the original page with this one:

https://www.lyft.com/work?_escaped_fragment_=

Implementing this is thankfully not too tricky.

Whilst there are various SaaS providers that will take care of it for you, it's relatively simple to add a rule that checks for the parameter, loads up the requested page in PhantomJS, and returns the rendered HTML.

Add a bit of caching, and the job's done.

[1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/174992?hl=en

    https://www.lyft.com/work?_escaped_fragment_=

Interesting. How did they make google check for that url in the first place? Via a sitemap or something?

Interesting. How did they make google check for that url in the first place? Via a sitemap or something?

By including the following meta tag:

  <meta name="fragment" content="!">

Google provide their own guide for this:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/174992?hl=en

Wow. That's nice. I wonder whats better: deliver the content via a <noscript> element or via the fragment url.

if ive been banned from lyft for reasons unknown, if my work signs up for this will i be able to use the platform?

I am looking forward to the day Lyft announces, "Autonomous Lyft."

I wouldn't hold my breath. I refused to use the service when I first discovered it because it was facebook only auth. I believe that has since changed, but user privacy is not a huge concern of theirs.

This word Autonomous. I don't think it means what you think it means.

I know what the word means and still don't get it.

He is confused with anonymous. The parent was suggesting self-driving Lyft, vs identity-free lyft riding.

Why pay to ride on a large land mammal? Cars work just fine.

To clarify the confusion...

The definition of autonomous I am using here is: "having the freedom to act independently" [1]

And in this context context I mean the car acting independently of the driver.

[1] http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/autonom...

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