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Show HN: Ulaxi calculates whether UberX, Lyft, or Taxi is best for your trip

stenographer-arithmetic-82316.bitballoon.com

31–38 of 38 posts

Re: Show HN: Ulaxi calculates whether UberX, Lyft, or Taxi is best for your trip

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for feedback! It's pretty clear people don't like the alert window, so I'll remove that. What I liked about the alert window is that it displayed results, on same page without needing to scroll, on a mobile device. Would you be OK with scrolling down to the see the results? Re: your second idea, that's definitely come up a lot. They don't have API so it requires a hack around. Are there phone apps out there th…

Uber has a mobile website - you could either scrape the site (probably much easier than trying to scrape an app) or capture the traffic and build your own kind of API. There's a service called gargl that says they do that kind of thing, although I haven't got around to looking at them yet.

Hm interesting! I had not heard of gargl - may check it out. This is a hard feature to implement without their permission. There is a benefit to Uber / Lyft, if there was a direct link to their apps.

Stack overflow q said exactly same thing - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11878609/is-it-possible-t...

Re: Show HN: Ulaxi calculates whether UberX, Lyft, or Taxi is best for your trip

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for feedback! It's pretty clear people don't like the alert window, so I'll remove that. What I liked about the alert window is that it displayed results, on same page without needing to scroll, on a mobile device. Is there a way I could hide/unhide dev elements to make the inputs disappear and results appear in their place? Or what were you imagining? I agree tiled is dated - I wanted to launch something rath…

Absolutely. You may end up doing something else but you could definitely hide/unhide an element to show your results. Check this out as an example: http://jsfiddle.net/atommorgan/8Fjsq/

Exactly what I imagined - thanks for the link!

Re: Show HN: Ulaxi calculates whether UberX, Lyft, or Taxi is best for your trip

#33
post #23
post #22

Are you taking into account the new Lyft pricing from last week? http://www.lyft.me/help?article=1263247 . Comparing it to the UberX rates https://www.uber.com/cities/san-francisco , it seems like Lyft should be always $0.50 more (when there is no happy hour/surge), unless I'm missing something.

I realized I could just look at the JS and I can answer my own question...so yes your Lyft rates need updating :). Cost per minute is now 0.3 and cost per mile is 1.5 http://www.lyft.me/help?article=1263247

Wow that was a huge drop on the mileage side. No I was not aware of that - I began coding this last week of March so missed this update. Thanks!

Re: Show HN: Ulaxi calculates whether UberX, Lyft, or Taxi is best for your trip

#34
post #22

Are you taking into account the new Lyft pricing from last week? http://www.lyft.me/help?article=1263247 . Comparing it to the UberX rates https://www.uber.com/cities/san-francisco , it seems like Lyft should be always $0.50 more (when there is no happy hour/surge), unless I'm missing something.

You are correct on your comparison of UberX and Lyft. To me it's dumb - if you're going to adjust your prices, why not match, ESPECIALLY in a commodity industry, unless you're trying to be a premium player?

They'll yammer on all day about how they're community based and thus different, but they had to significantly lower their prices didn't they? What's 50 cents going to be more to match UberX exactly?

Re: Show HN: Ulaxi calculates whether UberX, Lyft, or Taxi is best for your trip

#36
post #19

Are the rates displayed invalid when routing outside of the San Francisco area? I see the callout, but it still seems to work..

Each city has different prices and availability. I assume this will work for anywhere, but will use SF prices.

That's exactly right - works anywhere Google Maps directions works, but just applies SF rates.

Re: Show HN: Ulaxi calculates whether UberX, Lyft, or Taxi is best for your trip

#37

Some things I find interesting after accidentally mapping from my work to SF: Your trip is 2812.3 miles and will take 2455.1 minutes. 1.7 days? I found it hard to believe it would only take two days to drive the width of the country, but other maps/sources show the same time, minus breaks of course. Uber rate: $4957.94 Lyft rate: $6328.86 Taxi rate: $9087.01 For 21 miles per gallon using premium (my car; ugh), the co…

Yea if someone is totally utilized on UberX or Lyft they can make some good money.

Your story reminded me of the two guys who took a cab from NYC to LA for $5000. So they negotiated the rate down a bit with volume ;) http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2011-04-22-nyc-l...

Re: Show HN: Ulaxi calculates whether UberX, Lyft, or Taxi is best for your trip

#38
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realized I could just look at the JS and I can answer my own question...so yes your Lyft rates need updating :). Cost per minute is now 0.3 and cost per mile is 1.5 http://www.lyft.me/help?article=1263247

Wow that was a huge drop on the mileage side. No I was not aware of that - I began coding this last week of March so missed this update. Thanks!

Looks like Uber adds $1 to all rides now if you want to update your fare calculations http://blog.uber.com/saferides
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