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My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford

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Re: My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford

#141

Post by sokoloff »

ryacko wrote: post #100
khrbrt wrote: post #24

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.

No, the train system should be reorganized. Having multiple stops slows down travel. If Amtrak used shorter trains with a direct route, and all freight trains yielded to passenger trains, people will use more trains. Otherwise any train trip that takes over eight hours is unpalatable, no matter how bad airport security becomes.

The problem is Amtrak, at least in Northeast, is running on tracks mostly owned by the freight companies. No way they’re going to yield on the tracks they bought without Amtrak paying them handsomely for that.

Re: My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford

#142

Post by PhantomGremlin »

jeron wrote: post #125
bb101 wrote: post #117

"But since I flew into O’Hare on a commercial flight, like a common schmuck, Hertz wouldn’t give me the car, even though they clearly had it to give. Basically, I wasn’t rich enough to rent the car Hertz had allowed me to reserve, so they weren’t going to let me have it. Which, I don’t know. Seems like a real dick move on Hertz’s part, and doesn’t incline me to use them ever again for anything." The author's experien…

Every time I think of Hertz I think of how Accenture royally fucked them in their website redesign: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/23/hertz_accenture_law...

The salty language of these last few comments reminds me of the old FuckedCompany.com website. A guy named "Pud" ran it, and it was great. But I guess he got bored with it.

He'd write about Accenture back in the days. And when he did he'd always say: Accenture (pronounced ass-enter).

Sigh. Apologies in advance if this is drifting too much into Reddit territory.

As for that website redesign, I bet that USA Accenture shipped the actual work off to some third world country, probably India. It seems like standard modus operandi to get stuff back from India that only attempts to meet the bare minimum. E.g. as the article notes, just hardwire Hertz specific stuff, so can't easily deal with sister companies like Dollar and Thrifty.

It's a difficult problem to solve with outsourcing. You'll rarely get any sense of ownership from them. And why would you expect any?

Re: My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford

#143

Post by reallydontask »

ses1984 wrote: post #132
p2t2p wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Get to the airport, takes about 1 hour (drive 60k or 40 miles). If you don’t have a car - even longer. Well you also have to commute to train stations.

> Well you also have to commute to train stations.

True enough.

I live almost equidistantly from three international airports, all, nominally (that is without traffic) about 75 minutes drive away.

The closest main train station is a 15 minute bike ride away or a 10 minute drive away (without traffic). Funnily enough the local train station is slightly further away both by car and bike.

Re: My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford

#144

Post by mlang23 »

refurb wrote: post #29
khrbrt wrote: post #24

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.

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.

No, that is not realistic. With all the fucked up security nonsense and checkin times, and the time you need to get to the airport(s), its likely more like 5 or 6 hours vs 8. And considering the environmental footprint of a flight, I would happily take the train route, thank you.

Re: My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford

#145

Post by brianpgordon »

rayiner wrote: post #114
mulmen wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most of our rail network, outside the northeast corridor, is already vastly underutilized. Roads get more funding because that's what people use, and that's what's most convenient for 95% of people (who don't live in the downtown core of a major city) to use. But regardless, you can get an idea from the EU. EU rail subsidies amount to 73 billion euro annually. EU rail carried 465 billion passenger-kilometers in 2017,…

I know you probably realize this but I think it's worth pointing out that even though it's cheap for the government to maintain roads, the total cost of transporting people by car on those roads includes much more than just the roads. Of course, it's politically difficult for the government to ask people to spend less on their cars and give the money to it instead so it can more efficiently and cleanly transport them by rail.

Re: My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford

#146

Post by brianpgordon »

adamson wrote: post #49
morganvachon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The best and brightest people do not sign up to stand behind a booth at a car rental agency. According to the article, the guy behind the counter at Hertz agreed with the author about their insane charter flight policy, and tried to help him fix the situation, but was powerless. The red tape was all above his head and much of the confusion/frustration was on the phone with customer support.

If anything, the "best and brightest" folks in Hertz management who drafted the policies that both the phone assistant and the person behind the counter had to try to navigate (and who both acknowledged the policies they were struggling against were dumb) are the ones who failed big time here, not the every men that GP is insulting.

To be clear though, I doubt that someone in Hertz management sat down and devised this scenario deliberately to save a few bucks, hoping that nobody with social media clout would ever run into it. My guess is that it's the result of a web of misaligned incentives and organizational cruft that resulted in a creaky but mostly-working system that nobody ever fixed.

You can use your imagination to fill in the details for fun - maybe 8 years ago some stressed-out shift manager without enough people to work the rental desk (due to a freak corporate-mandated hiring freeze) got a call asking for updated contact information for his location and he hesitated a moment and the caller, a temp on loan for the day, helpfully suggested that they just leave the extension blank for now, and marked the location done. And over the next 8 years the company was making its numbers and there was no need to rock the boat and dump a bunch of money into management consultants to tear everything up and start over fresh, and the VP of airports just had a grandkid and was letting his lieutenants run things on autopilot, and the CEO was happy as a clam with his 2pm golf games and expensed steak dinners and had no idea that anything was wrong, etc etc etc etc. The WSJ exposé following Hertz's surprise Chapter 11 filing practically writes itself.

Re: My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford

#147

Post by Semaphor »

sharadov wrote: post #2

What a great story? I always ask Lyft/Uber drivers about interesting stories. One told me how he picked up 3 girls outside of a fancy condo in LA and drove them to Vegas which is about 300 miles and a 5 hr ride. Turns out the girls were drunk and the condo guy had called for a ride to take them home, And they decided they rather go to Vegas to continue the party ;-)

There were [0]/are [1] fun twitch uber/lyft livestreams on twitch. They ask the passengers if they are okay with being livestreamed and have text-to-speech commands in chat. Tablet in the car for the passengers to interact with chat if they want to. It's a cool experience, especially with the party crowd.

[0]: https://www.twitch.tv/cinnabarcorp [1]: https://www.twitch.tv/b3ck

Re: My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford

#148

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

jschwartzi wrote: post #88
cldellow wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When I talked to Enterprise on the phone about one-way use, they explicitly told me most places will waive the charge unless they don't have space to take the inventory. Rental car places have a lot of fixed capital costs like hotels, and renting the car at anything above a significant loss still recoups those costs. You can usually just ask for things. I've been offered upgrades pretty routinely just because they do…

Interesting that they’ve always tried to charge you for the upgrade - I’ve always gotten it for free without having to ask (though I use Avis almost entirely and can’t remember the last time I used Enterprise). They just tell me “Sorry we were out of this car, here’s an upgraded one”. Seems weird that they should charge you more for not having the car you booked. Granted, they never dump me into sports cars when it happens (it’s almost always the very next tier of car available).

Re: My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford

#149

Post by thaumasiotes »

dredmorbius wrote: post #134
rayiner wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LGA to ORD is 3 million passengers per year. Beijing to Shanghai is 7 million by air, plus 180 million by train (including intermediate stops). Total US air travel between all destinations is only 750 million per year. The ability of the Chinese to recoup their capital investment through ridership is massive compared to what you could expect in the US.

Rail passengers to Denver, CO, in 1869, numbered nil. Construction of the 100 mile Denver Pacific spur line to the transcontinental railroad route in Cheyenne not only increased that somewhat, but saw Denver's population grow from 4,700 th over 35,000 within ten years. Induced demand is a thing.

You can only induce as much travel demand as there are people to potentially travel. No amount of induced demand will let US travel infrastructure transport the number of people that Chinese travel infrastructure does.

Re: My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford

#150

Post by dang »

learnfromstory wrote: post #136
envy2 wrote: post #42

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.

Once I rented a car in Seattle one way to Vancouver. Apparently there is some shitburg nobody has ever heard of called Vancouver, WA but I was going to the more famous Canadian city. The flunkie at the counter booked the domestic trip and I drove to the proper Vancouver. When I got there they tried to charge me over $8000 in fees. I think there is no practical upper bound to what they'll try to charge you for such th…

Please keep regional slurs off this site. Imagine if you were one of HN's readers in Vancouver WA and read this comment. Not nice, and quite unnecessary for your point. Ditto for "the flunkie at the counter". We don't need comments here that think they're that much better than other people.
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