Well, car owners living in Manhattan, anyway. I doubt the same is true for FHV drivers coming in from further out.
There aren't many poor people commuting into Manhattan every day using a car. You'd be spending way more on fuel and parking than the monthly MTA ticket costs.
Well, if you're an FHV driver, MTA won't cut it, since you can't take it on the train with you, and you need it to do your job. On the upside, given the nature of the work, you shouldn't have to worry too much about parking costs.
Driving a car from A to B is less miles driven than someone driving from X to A to pick you up before driving to B to drop you off them Y to wait for next ride. Thus Uber increases congestion.
You'd need to allocate more parking spaces then. You can have more roads if you have less parking. Also, having a car sit idle 95% of the time is not an efficient use of money. It's the same model as virtualization with servers (sharing unused capacity brings down the costs for everyone). Also, there's the tremendous amount of time wasted and hassle to park, especially in big cities that have multi-story parking gara…
Parking spaces can go 3D via underground parking a lot more easily than roads can go 3D. Street level parking is a fraction of total parking in the hart of NYC where congestion is a huge issue.
Agree with all of this except the part about enforcing the traffic laws against cars parked in the bike lanes. The NYPD is most certainly lazy and incompetent (as well as corrupt), but the issue is the bike lanes themselves. Most of the city, especially the most congested parts, simple have no room for a bike lane. The vast majority of vehicles blocking the bike lanes are making pickups or deliveries. There is simply…
> There is simply nowhere else for them to pull over Yes there is. We've just zoned it for streetside parking.
Do you live in New York? Have you been to Manhattan? There is very little parking anywhere. In the busiest places there is no street parking at all.
"I've had ride shares cancel on me once the driver's gotten close enough to see that the destination is an airport." I'm not understanding this. If you're using the app correctly then the driver knows the destination before they even accept the ride. If you're setting an address near an airport in an attempt to be duplicitous I would be equally discouraged as a driver.
Happens all. the. time. I'm in NYC, and I use taxis 99% of the time because of this phenomenon: Uber/Lyft drivers rapidly accept your ride, then cancel (or slow-play the pickup, so that you cancel, to protect their driver rating) as soon as they see it's a place they don't want to go. It's so bad here that I just won't deal with Lyft and Uber unless they're throwing serious discounts my way, and I have time to burn.
The worst part is how much of your time it wastes. With a cab, whatever, another one is coming soon. But with rideshares, you could be waiting awhile on someone who'll cancel on you, thus wasting a lot more time. Even if twice as many taxis refuse to go there as rideshares, I'm still wasting more time on the rideshares, so it's worse.
My understanding is that with Lyft, the driver does not see the destination until they've reached (or come close to) your location. And yes, I'm using the app correctly -- not sure why you're jumping to some conclusion that I must be being duplicitous. There's no convenient "nearby" drop-off points near airports here anyway.
I've never used Lyft so couldn't comment there. And you're jumping to a conclusion assuming I was jumping to a conclusion. I was just trying to make sense of how that could happen as you described.
As a social tip: If you accuse someone of potentially being duplicitous, you shouldn't be surprised when they don't react positively to it. And if you don't know a lot about something, your first guess shouldn't be that the person you're talking to must be lying about something.
> There is simply nowhere else for them to pull over Yes there is. We've just zoned it for streetside parking.
Do you live in New York? Have you been to Manhattan? There is very little parking anywhere. In the busiest places there is no street parking at all.
> Have you been to Manhattan?
I live on 26th Street. We have a bike lane, a traffic lane, and two sides of street side parking. This is the case across a large faction of Manhattan, the avenues exempted. For Exhibit A in stupid parking lanes, I present Broadway.
Alternative title: "NYC Taxi mafia strikes back, gives Uber 12 months to come up with a large enough bribe". Really, the life of nearly everyone (who's not a taxi driver, perhaps) improved a bit since Uber entered the city. Even the fabled subway in its theoretical best has been dysfunctional in Brooklyn since the takedown of streetcars a hundred years ago (see how all the tracks are running towards Manhattan and ver…
The flipside is this may actually be good for NYC Uber drivers. Generally I feel like they have to sweat and toil to make a living, more so than Uber drivers in other cities. This may give them some relief as supply stays constant.
What I don't understand is why these kind of "ride sharing" services don't do more to protect their drivers (I almost said "employees"). Salesmen in the same company who work on commission generally parcel out different communities (or at least clients) they are responsible for so they don't compete with each other. Fast food franchises from the same chain don't set up next to each other.
When you have so many drivers from the same company competing with each other for rides it brings wages down. I guess Uber doesn't care because they get their share either way and there are enough people who are desperate enough that they'll take low wages and long hours that they get.
Happens all. the. time. I'm in NYC, and I use taxis 99% of the time because of this phenomenon: Uber/Lyft drivers rapidly accept your ride, then cancel (or slow-play the pickup, so that you cancel, to protect their driver rating) as soon as they see it's a place they don't want to go. It's so bad here that I just won't deal with Lyft and Uber unless they're throwing serious discounts my way, and I have time to burn.
Fair enough. I've been taking Ubers to JFK for years and have never had this happen - but I guess everyone has their own experiences.
If the problem they are trying to solve is "too many vehicles" then we need a congestion tax. They should certainly not be limiting vehicles that are more likely to take multiple people with a Pool option. If the problem they are trying to solve is "drivers aren't making enough" then they should impose a minimum wage on drivers or force an actual employee relationship. If the problem they are trying to solve is a bai…
I would love a congestion tax. I take a bike to work, but there's no good cross-town protected bike lanes, so I hit so a lot of damn vehicle traffic that severely slows down my commute. I frequently have to go slow to wend my way through narrow gaps of parked cars and cars stuck in traffic, and sometimes get stuck completely with double parking or construction. Make more protected bike lanes so that vehicle congestio…
Does anyone know what would be the best way to get these bike lanes? Is the only way to petition our local politicians or are there any other ways?
I've never used Lyft so couldn't comment there. And you're jumping to a conclusion assuming I was jumping to a conclusion. I was just trying to make sense of how that could happen as you described.
As a social tip: If you accuse someone of potentially being duplicitous, you shouldn't be surprised when they don't react positively to it. And if you don't know a lot about something, your first guess shouldn't be that the person you're talking to must be lying about something.
You seem very sensitive about this, so once again I'll just mea culpa and say I never stood up and yelled j'accuse - your description of the problem just made little sense to me and I was trying to discuss how it might be possible.