the driver probably made around $200 from this ride which is more than how much he would have made working the whole day, except this time he mostly drove on a highway at steady speeds instead of dealing with 30 short distance rides and 30 different people. everybody wins
My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford
101–110 of 191 posts
Re: My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is nothing, except Chicago’s suburbs, within about 300 miles of Chicago in every direction. Also, our train system has more than funding parity with roads. Road spending is about $175 billion per year, about half of which isn’t recovered from use fees, for 5 trillion passenger miles. That’s about $0.02 per mile subsidy. Amtrak’s capital expenditures is about $900 million per year, which comes directly from Cong…
You mean besides Milwaukee, Madison, Grand Rapids, Indianapolis, Cedar Rapids, St Louis, Cincinatti and Toledo? That's more people than Chicago itself. If you take Chicagoland as an endpoint and not the city boundaries, Des Moines is also within 300 miles. Transcontinental high speed rail is, I agree strongly with your subtextual argument, a pipe dream. But regional HSR in the midwest would make a lot of sense.
You forgot Detroit, and Louisville, and almost in spitting distance of Minneapolis
Re: My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford
#103This 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.
“So... do you want the car back or not?”
"So... do you want us to report the car as stolen or not?"
Re: My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean besides Milwaukee, Madison, Grand Rapids, Indianapolis, Cedar Rapids, St Louis, Cincinatti and Toledo? That's more people than Chicago itself. If you take Chicagoland as an endpoint and not the city boundaries, Des Moines is also within 300 miles. Transcontinental high speed rail is, I agree strongly with your subtextual argument, a pipe dream. But regional HSR in the midwest would make a lot of sense.
You forgot Detroit, and Louisville, and almost in spitting distance of Minneapolis
Oh, you're right! My brain always stops at Ann Arbor, which I thought was too small to include.
Re: My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford
#105This 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.
There is nothing, except Chicago’s suburbs, within about 300 miles of Chicago in every direction. Also, our train system has more than funding parity with roads. Road spending is about $175 billion per year, about half of which isn’t recovered from use fees, for 5 trillion passenger miles. That’s about $0.02 per mile subsidy. Amtrak’s capital expenditures is about $900 million per year, which comes directly from Cong…
That's a very convenient way to define parity. If we funded railroads at 175bn per year what would be subsidy come to? Presumably there would be a lot more passengers at that level.
Re: My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford
#106The utter inability to get a one-way rental is quite obnoxious. Also the bit about how he was able to reserve a car, but he wasn't a charter flight. Hertz's utter incompetence on the phone was striking as well from some sort of bizarro catch-22 world.
The entire rental car experience is ridiculously complicated and inefficient. Look at the difference in renting a Zipcar (owned by Avis) and a regular rental car company. With Zipcar I can reserve a car in minutes, pick up the car I actually reserved without waiting in line or even going into an office, get charged the amount I was quoted and not find out it's twice the cost from some hidden fees and taxes.
Zipcars are great, but their coverage has shrunk over time. There's maybe a 10th of the number of vehicles, and back then Enterprise (formerly car2go) had an almost equal number of vehicles (Enterprise shut it down a while back.
Re: My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is nothing, except Chicago’s suburbs, within about 300 miles of Chicago in every direction. Also, our train system has more than funding parity with roads. Road spending is about $175 billion per year, about half of which isn’t recovered from use fees, for 5 trillion passenger miles. That’s about $0.02 per mile subsidy. Amtrak’s capital expenditures is about $900 million per year, which comes directly from Cong…
That's a very convenient way to define parity. If we funded railroads at 175bn per year what would be subsidy come to? Presumably there would be a lot more passengers at that level.
The point of the exercise is to look at air passenger statistics to get a broad sense of what the high watermark of usage would be, since air travel is the dominant way of navigating the continental US.
Re: My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford
#108The other hack is to “pony express” in stages: use Lyft/Uber to get part way or to a mid point, where you are confident you CAN get a rental, a train/bus, or another Lyft/Uber to keep going. This is especially useful if you can’t find a driver that will take you all the way.
I got in short but very loud argument with an airport taxi driver when I did this to get dropped off just outside the airport taxi zone. The “real” ride was 5x the price at the airport taxi rate vs taking an Uber. The louder the driver got, the more I realized how good of decision it was to get the hell out of his car.
Re: My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford
#109Re: My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford
#110Earlier 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.
Don’t you need some sort of commercial insurance if you’re driving people around for money?