81–90 of 191 posts
I would have not paid Lyft directly, but instead I would have negotiated with the driver (edit: yes, after having paid the initial few dollars to summon one).
And with that you most likely lose any sort of protection/insurance Lyft gives you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ohio had plans to connect Toledo, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Columbus, however the Governor at the time turned down the federal money.
I'm sure it wasn't free. Federal money for stuff like that usually has strings attached.
In Wisconsin’s case it was about $800MM with no local match needed and the catch was committing to running the service for 20 years.
Even as someone who wasn’t a big fan of the project I’m still annoyed because we’ve now spent significantly more than 20 years of operating costs for work that would have been paid for if we took the money.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
$.50 is already lower than the IRS rate ($.58 this year). It may be a little conservative, but it's not crazy. You absolutely should be computing TCO of the vehicle and amortizing that if you are driving for a service like Lyft. What fixed costs do you think don't fully apply?
Time based depreciation and registration, insurance, and property/excise tax are all fixed costs that apply whether or not the Lyft driver takes that 300 mile round trip or parks the car that day.
This is why we need a train system with funding parity to the highway and airport systems. There should be trains leaving constantly, at most every 10 minutes, from Chicago to the east, and frequent, semihourly, trains between neighboring cities along the way. Even if the author could rent a car, having to drive 300 miles is astounding waste of time and mental energy.
Of course, it's not as nice as having regular, smooth, fast trains. But the situation is not as dire as people make it out to be.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And with that you most likely lose any sort of protection/insurance Lyft gives you.
What protection/insurance?
The protection/insurance that kicks in when you get in an accident or the driver decides after fifty miles that fuck it, they don't want to drive any more.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can’t imagine a train leaving every 10 minutes could ever be cost effective. There just aren’t that many people who want to do that trip (8 hours?) when you could do it in 2 hours by plane.
It is not two hours. The flight time from my home town to Moscow is 50 minutes. Whole trip is about 6 hours. Get to the airport, takes about 1 hour (drive 60k or 40 miles). If you don’t have a car - even longer. You arrive in advance, security, luggage check in then boarding, then runway. It’s been around 3 hours so far. Now you fly for 50 to 70 minutes and it doesn’t include the plane driving through airport after l…
> Chris Jackson, the editor-in-chief of Railway Gazette International, based in London, said JR East wanted to raise their maximum train speed to 224 miles per hour to achieve a journey time between Tokyo to Sapporo that rivals flying.
> Currently, the world’s fastest trains in regular service run between Beijing and Shanghai, in China, at speeds up to 217 miles an hour, he said.
Sapporo is over 500 miles from Tokyo, and the trains might be faster than a 600mph plane ride...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least for Hertz, they can charge you a grand total of $10 here (if you call them to change it) or otherwise $12/day per their T&C: https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/reservation/reviewmodifycance... "This fee of $10 will be applied if you return your car to a different location from that which was scheduled, or if you return more than 12 hours after the date and time previously scheduled, and you notify us of an exten…
Elsewhere, the contract notes: "Any changes to the reservation may impact the rental charges." Which is what will happen here. They'll charge you this fee, but also adjust the base rental charges to much higher rates that reflect the fleet management burden caused by one-way rentals.
This is a fun story—but he should've just booked a round-trip rental car, and dropped it off in Dayton anyway. I've done this a bunch of times, and all they'll do is charge you the one-way rate and grumble a bit... Better to ask forgiveness than permission.