Hacker News Reader

My hack for taking Ubers from an airport is to simply get in the first rental car shuttle, go to their lot, and call an uber to their lot while you're in the shuttle. Get off the shuttle, get into Uber. Win.

On the other hand, I've had a nearly identical experience with an Uber driver relying on GPS. In fact, it's been my experience that Uber drivers rely on their GPS far more often than taxi drivers, who generally give me the impression that they actually know the city that they drive in.

I wonder how long the average Uber driver has been driving professionally. I would be interested to see some stats on that subject, especially compared to regular taxi services.

This. I rarely have issues with Uber Black, but with UberX, I routinely have to keep one eye on the road so the driver doesn't get lost. It's one thing when we are headed to my house, but when I'm going to SFO, I expect any for-hire driver to just know how to get there. Especially now that Uber has nav built into the app!

Well, as long as we're hating on Uber a little too, I'll put under Full Disclosure that there've been a number of times when the driver accepts my hail then proceeded to drive in the opposite direction for ten minutes... that's my main complaint honestly. :b

I had a driver stop to get gas on their way to me. Another one was very close when they accepted the hail, but after several minutes after I expected them to arrive I checked the map and noted they stopped at a CVS.

It's been a while since I had this problem: many times I'd hail an uberx, it'd be accepted, and then I'd have to wait 8-10 minutes for the driver to leave their home. It was upsetting, and I think uber may have fixed it by now, but I had to remind myself it was still better than the experience I used to have when calling for a cab.

I live in Dallas, btw.

This seems to be how Uber's pulling it off: the costs of a worldwide Uber-dominated oligopoly are far away and intangible while the costs of the current atomized regulated oligoplies are present and clear.

When Google was picking up steam back in the early 2000's it seemed wonderful because there were so many immediate benefits. Now, 10-15 years later it's clear how much power we gave them and what opportunities we lost in doing so. Instead of "free" stuff we could have worked towards a model of privacy and reasonable subscription fees where user-tracking and advertising weren't the default business model of the internet. But we didn't look ahead, we just said "Give us that shiny new thing!"

I hope I'm wrong but Uber looks the same to me, it's that nagging feeling of somebody's gonna have to pay the piper.

What opportunities have we lost to Google?

And how can you implement subscription without tracking? A subscription-based search engine, or a video hosting website, would need to connect your searches and watching habits with a credit card.

In the ad-based business model all the people who use Google's services aren't Google's customers, they're Google's product. Google's customers are the companies who pay for advertising. We lost the opportunity of not building the web this way.

The tracking necessary to process payments is reasonable as-is but you could also pay cash for gift-cards that work just like credit cards. Either way that's nothing like the tracking that happens for targeted advertising.

Google didn't bring the ad-based business model, it was here long before they created Adwords. Yahoo!, Altavista, all had banners and sponsored links.

No, a subscription service need only connect the presence of your login cookie with a credit card.

You are free to create google analog. No one is prohibiting you. And with the way google results have gone downhill in the last 5 years - it is way past due.

The page rank is not the only possible strategy for effective search.

Google hasn't used PageRank exclusively for years. Nowadays it's just one factor among many.

>You are free to create google analog. No one is prohibiting you

Google's massive patent arsenal disagrees with you. I imagine many common and obvious search methods have a government granted monopoly due to our corrupt patent system. Even Microsoft, with a massive patent arsenal itself, couldnt work out deals with Google and gets sued now and again:

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2240889/microsoft-g...

How can Joe Startup compete in this space?

Ignore the lawyers. Break the law. Opensource the search code. Create a chain of companies and burn each one when hit with a lawsuit. Don't try to win lawsuits - just use every possible tactic to delay them and so on. Create the company in a country where there are no software patents.

There is a direct MARTA train connection from Atlanta airport to Sandy Springs. And compared to NY and Chicago subways, I have found MARTA to be lot cleaner. It would have been more time and cost effective to take the train and then a hail a cab to your final destination. I doubt money was your primary concern if the cab driver was going round in circle. Also I believe that uber drivers are more tech savvy than regular cab drivers.

> There is a direct MARTA train connection from Atlanta airport to Sandy Springs.

Not on a Sunday night, there isn't. The trains run less often, and you need to transfer from the Gold Line to the Red Line, and then you can transfer to a cab. So on evenings I'd take Uber to the hotel ($35ish) and it'd take about half an hour (airport to hotel, door to door). Friday evenings, now, taking MARTA would take an hour and traffic will take an hour or more and there was a convenient workplace-to-MARTA shuttle, so why not?

(Yes, it was on an expense account, so saving money wasn't my primary object, but that doesn't mean no one leans on you to keep expenses down. The cab-driver-in-circles was more an episode in hilarity than an expense that impacted me, though the ride still came to like $70.)

I'm not sure how much you paid but taxi service to Sandy Springs from the Atlanta airport should have been a flat rate + extra miles.

Price to midtown Atlanta - $30 Price to Buckhead - $40

I paid like $70.

Thank the regulators for protecting me from unscrupulous taxi drivers' scams!!! :b

When something like that happens to me, I pay with a credit card and dispute it afterwards. At the very least, the driver gets hit with a $15 charge for the dispute, regardless of whether he wins. At best, I win the dispute and get my money back.

Edit: also, if there are enough charge-backs/disputes on the driver/company's merchant account, they'll get dropped or have higher rates.

So why not ask for a receipt with start and end location and total price paid?

You then file a complaint with the relevant authorities, which in turn will hit the cheating cabbie; hard.

My brother was a taxi dispatcher (granted, not in America, which seems the total hell hole when it comes to taxi service) and there where drivers trying to pull such shit on unsuspecting tourists (circling around for 250$ for a tour, which should have been 40, max) and I can guarantee you that this cabbie did not have a happy encounter after the passenger filed a complaint.

That process takes a dramatically longer amount of time than one email to Uber's support. A lot of times it isn't worth the hassle.

Just so I get that straight:

People opposed to regulations because they're stringent and apparently protect a monopoly don't bother with the exact same regulators that enforce their rights because it takes too much time to file a complaint?

OK, whatever...

I'm not sure I follow what you're saying, mind explaining this bit:

"

People opposed to regulations because they're stringent and apparently protect a monopoly don't bother with the exact same regulators that enforce their rights because it takes too much time to file a complaint? "

>I don't really trust Uber any further than I can throw my smartphone, but anything is better than a generic airport taxi.

What happens when all the taxi drivers just become Uber drivers? This is happening in Chicago, where taxis double-dip as both Uber and standard taxi drivers. Its the same shitty service, same filthy cabs, and same dumb as rocks shenanigans. With uber there's fixed pricing and no tipping, which is nice, but it doesn't solve the issues you have with crazy/bad drivers.

I keep hearing how Uber is going to change everything, but it seems like 'meet the new boss, same as the old boss.' The labor willing to drive all day in car/cab aren't going to be our brightest and best. They're going to be marginal people who, for whatever reason, can't get a better job.

I think uber-x has had an early halo effect drawing in some casuals between jobs, but now it seems to be hardcore drivers and the types of people drawn to that kind of work. Its shit work, stressful (traffic sucks), etc. I just don't see a solution here. Uber drivers aren't some magical breed of person. Uber just hasn't been in business long enough to have the same amount of horror stories.

Uber usually utilizes the phone GPS which the driver always puts on the dashboard. Makes it a lot harder to trick the riders.