The first time I landed in Atlanta (as a destination, not a connection airport) I took a taxi from the Atlanta airport to Sandy Springs (exactly on the opposite side of downtown, just outside the Perimeter). Shortly after leaving the airport, my driver diverted off the interstate (ostensibly to avoid a traffic jam) and promptly proceeded to drive around in circles, lapping the same parking lot twice (he was about to do it a third time before I intervened) because his GPS was telling him to turn around and get back on the highway and he didn't quite realize that was happening and kept missing the U-turn. (Also, the overall rate is close to twice Uber's.)
I don't really trust Uber any further than I can throw my smartphone, but anything is better than a generic airport taxi. (At LGA, I've taken cabs more often than Atlanta -- it's harder to wait for Uber in the cold of winter -- and while I've never had any real trouble with Uber ever I've had two different taxi drivers pulled over and issued a ticket while I was in the taxi, both of them for running a red light on a left-hand-turn signal...)
Anyway. In conclusion: fuck you, Atlanta airport/government.
My hack for taking Ubers from an airport is to simply get in the first rental car shuttle, go to their lot, and call an uber to their lot while you're in the shuttle. Get off the shuttle, get into Uber. Win.
On the other hand, I've had a nearly identical experience with an Uber driver relying on GPS. In fact, it's been my experience that Uber drivers rely on their GPS far more often than taxi drivers, who generally give me the impression that they actually know the city that they drive in.
I wonder how long the average Uber driver has been driving professionally. I would be interested to see some stats on that subject, especially compared to regular taxi services.
This. I rarely have issues with Uber Black, but with UberX, I routinely have to keep one eye on the road so the driver doesn't get lost. It's one thing when we are headed to my house, but when I'm going to SFO, I expect any for-hire driver to just know how to get there. Especially now that Uber has nav built into the app!
Well, as long as we're hating on Uber a little too, I'll put under Full Disclosure that there've been a number of times when the driver accepts my hail then proceeded to drive in the opposite direction for ten minutes... that's my main complaint honestly. :b
I had a driver stop to get gas on their way to me. Another one was very close when they accepted the hail, but after several minutes after I expected them to arrive I checked the map and noted they stopped at a CVS.
It's been a while since I had this problem: many times I'd hail an uberx, it'd be accepted, and then I'd have to wait 8-10 minutes for the driver to leave their home. It was upsetting, and I think uber may have fixed it by now, but I had to remind myself it was still better than the experience I used to have when calling for a cab.
This seems to be how Uber's pulling it off: the costs of a worldwide Uber-dominated oligopoly are far away and intangible while the costs of the current atomized regulated oligoplies are present and clear.
When Google was picking up steam back in the early 2000's it seemed wonderful because there were so many immediate benefits. Now, 10-15 years later it's clear how much power we gave them and what opportunities we lost in doing so. Instead of "free" stuff we could have worked towards a model of privacy and reasonable subscription fees where user-tracking and advertising weren't the default business model of the internet. But we didn't look ahead, we just said "Give us that shiny new thing!"
I hope I'm wrong but Uber looks the same to me, it's that nagging feeling of somebody's gonna have to pay the piper.
And how can you implement subscription without tracking? A subscription-based search engine, or a video hosting website, would need to connect your searches and watching habits with a credit card.
In the ad-based business model all the people who use Google's services aren't Google's customers, they're Google's product. Google's customers are the companies who pay for advertising. We lost the opportunity of not building the web this way.
The tracking necessary to process payments is reasonable as-is but you could also pay cash for gift-cards that work just like credit cards. Either way that's nothing like the tracking that happens for targeted advertising.
You are free to create google analog. No one is prohibiting you. And with the way google results have gone downhill in the last 5 years - it is way past due.
The page rank is not the only possible strategy for effective search.
>You are free to create google analog. No one is prohibiting you
Google's massive patent arsenal disagrees with you. I imagine many common and obvious search methods have a government granted monopoly due to our corrupt patent system. Even Microsoft, with a massive patent arsenal itself, couldnt work out deals with Google and gets sued now and again:
Ignore the lawyers. Break the law. Opensource the search code. Create a chain of companies and burn each one when hit with a lawsuit. Don't try to win lawsuits - just use every possible tactic to delay them and so on. Create the company in a country where there are no software patents.
There is a direct MARTA train connection from Atlanta airport to Sandy Springs. And compared to NY and Chicago subways, I have found MARTA to be lot cleaner. It would have been more time and cost effective to take the train and then a hail a cab to your final destination. I doubt money was your primary concern if the cab driver was going round in circle. Also I believe that uber drivers are more tech savvy than regular cab drivers.
> There is a direct MARTA train connection from Atlanta airport to Sandy Springs.
Not on a Sunday night, there isn't. The trains run less often, and you need to transfer from the Gold Line to the Red Line, and then you can transfer to a cab. So on evenings I'd take Uber to the hotel ($35ish) and it'd take about half an hour (airport to hotel, door to door). Friday evenings, now, taking MARTA would take an hour and traffic will take an hour or more and there was a convenient workplace-to-MARTA shuttle, so why not?
(Yes, it was on an expense account, so saving money wasn't my primary object, but that doesn't mean no one leans on you to keep expenses down. The cab-driver-in-circles was more an episode in hilarity than an expense that impacted me, though the ride still came to like $70.)
When something like that happens to me, I pay with a credit card and dispute it afterwards. At the very least, the driver gets hit with a $15 charge for the dispute, regardless of whether he wins. At best, I win the dispute and get my money back.
Edit: also, if there are enough charge-backs/disputes on the driver/company's merchant account, they'll get dropped or have higher rates.
So why not ask for a receipt with start and end location and total price paid?
You then file a complaint with the relevant authorities, which in turn will hit the cheating cabbie; hard.
My brother was a taxi dispatcher (granted, not in America, which seems the total hell hole when it comes to taxi service) and there where drivers trying to pull such shit on unsuspecting tourists (circling around for 250$ for a tour, which should have been 40, max) and I can guarantee you that this cabbie did not have a happy encounter after the passenger filed a complaint.
People opposed to regulations because they're stringent and apparently protect a monopoly don't bother with the exact same regulators that enforce their rights because it takes too much time to file a complaint?
I'm not sure I follow what you're saying, mind explaining this bit:
"
People opposed to regulations because they're stringent and apparently protect a monopoly don't bother with the exact same regulators that enforce their rights because it takes too much time to file a complaint?
"
>I don't really trust Uber any further than I can throw my smartphone, but anything is better than a generic airport taxi.
What happens when all the taxi drivers just become Uber drivers? This is happening in Chicago, where taxis double-dip as both Uber and standard taxi drivers. Its the same shitty service, same filthy cabs, and same dumb as rocks shenanigans. With uber there's fixed pricing and no tipping, which is nice, but it doesn't solve the issues you have with crazy/bad drivers.
I keep hearing how Uber is going to change everything, but it seems like 'meet the new boss, same as the old boss.' The labor willing to drive all day in car/cab aren't going to be our brightest and best. They're going to be marginal people who, for whatever reason, can't get a better job.
I think uber-x has had an early halo effect drawing in some casuals between jobs, but now it seems to be hardcore drivers and the types of people drawn to that kind of work. Its shit work, stressful (traffic sucks), etc. I just don't see a solution here. Uber drivers aren't some magical breed of person. Uber just hasn't been in business long enough to have the same amount of horror stories.
I find it interesting that most comments from people using uber are about price. To me it is rather about convenience. I have never been in Atlanta's airport but most airports and train stations I use in Europe have a 30min+ queue for taxis. To me the revolution was to be able to book on my smartphone, not have to carry cash and worry about whether I have enough to go back home, not having to wait outside of a bar looking for a cab but rather booking it from my table and only leaving the bar when the taxi is there, etc.
I remember a taxi ride with some colleagues in Paris. That was even before uber. The driver (a licensed taxi) was ranting about the fact that there were too many taxis. And to make his points he said something like "a few years ago, a client could call a taxi company and taxis were so rare that he wouldn't even be sure he would get a taxi, these were the good days". We were not very sympathetic.
In all the places I live in, taxis had a toxic monopole that needed to be challenged.
> not have to carry cash and worry about whether I have enough to go back home
I was so thankful when the City of Dallas passed laws requiring all cabs to accept credit cards and install credit card readers. That made riding in a cab much less painful... until I discovered Lyft, and now I'm too used to doing everything on my phone to ever go back.
Yeap. Here in Lisbon, just a month ago, after I told him my destination (which would come to ~5€), the taxi driver started ranting how they should raise the minimum ride to 15€. What a nice way to greet your customer /s
I once got a regular taxi from terminal 4 to terminal 2 at Heathrow because the tube had packed up and I needed to get a flight but the taxis hate that. They have to queue for 3 or 4 hours to get a fare because the fares being so marked up it pays for them to do so. Heathrow to Harpenden, ~40 miles is about £120 by regular black cab, £50 by Uber for example. The system seems dumb - they should drop the regular cab fare to something more like the market rate.
In many cities (Florence comes to mind) there is a tacit understanding where street vendors sell good on the streets, but have to be able to put them away quickly enough to "hide" them when the police car comes past on one of it's periodic circuits.
The variable enforcement of laws (like my example, and also like the laws around taxi pick-ups) is something I'm very interested in from a formal economics view. Are there any studies showing the how the loose enforcement impacts different groups?
> “Did you really think we want those laws observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Reardon, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with.”
In turn, that makes it feel odd that the prevailing opinion in these parts is often that the police enforce things too harshly, but the cure for every economic and social ill is always more Government micro-managing...
> In turn, that makes it feel odd that the prevailing opinion in these parts is often that the police enforce things too harshly, but the cure for every economic and social ill is always more Government micro-managing...
Show a principle that is broader than introducing new micro-regulations but would result in better outcomes. Considering the complexity of our reality, I doubt it's possible. Edge cases, functional requirements of life are numerous, and sure, there are a lot of old policies on the books, simply removing them would also cause too much perturbations. And no one cares enough about abstract efficiency, elegance and such to propose and fight for a plant to gradually deprecate them. (Minor examples are various tax exemptions, major example is the whole social security problem looming on the horizon. And the whole problem of healthcare economics fits here. People are rational, but have nasty time-dependent preference inversions, just to point out a problem with going with a simple and general solution.)
And this not too surprisingly has nothing to do with too harsh enforcement of some laws. (You just guessed the war on drugs. And general over-militarization of the police and the hostility of the criminal justice system.)
> Show a principle that is broader than introducing new micro-regulations but would result in better outcomes
The alternative to regulating what, how and when everyone should do everything is to let people do what they want, but allow anyone to sue if they damage people or property.
If it results in better outcomes is of course debatable, but it has a long and defendable track record.
> but allow anyone to sue if they damage people or property.
That's the same as saying the only people who should get justice are those with the wealth and free time to file lawsuits for everything.
Consider, say, the case of a company over-billing you – are you going to take time of work, pay to hire lawyers, maybe retain an expert witness to attack the credibility of their billing system, etc. or will you just write it off and pay the extra $50? Companies which do things like that tend to do them on a scale where they can afford to pay for tons of attorneys to make that job as hard as possible.
(Oh, wait, bad news will spread and the invisible hand will correct that! That's sure worked wonders for Comcast…)
The sarcastic answer is that the current system favor those with the wealth and free time to purchase enough lobbying to get the regulations they want.
But you're of course right that perfect automatic justice doesn't arise in either system.
I'm a big fan of the "loser pays" system for lawsuits that's very common outside the US. That means that it's economically risk free both to file suits and to be sued if the court rules in your favor.
Your Comcast story is more about class action law suits, which I think can be a worthwhile feature of a legal system.
I like the idea of loser pays for certain classes of abuse but you need some mechanism to counter the innate tendency to deter the non-rich from filing a lawsuit in all but the most certain of cases. Some sort of a good faith exemption would be nice but it'd have to be very carefully constructed.
This becomes particularly obvious when you look at things which aren't extremely clear-cut cases. Say the company across the street is polluting. With a remotely-competent regulatory system, you can contact the local government and they [hopefully] have funding to investigate. With a lawsuit-driven system, you'd have to be prepared to pay for all of that out of pocket while trying to demonstrate direct losses for something which is rarely be more precise than a statistical likelihood in the hope that you'll eventually be compensated.
With loser pays, you now have the risk of having to pick up the tab for the company's top-notch legal team, too, which gives them powerful leverage to push you towards a settlement if the case isn't going 100% your way – after all, it's only your house that's on the line. If the company loses, it's not like the CEO has to pay for it personally.
The reason why we have the regulatory agencies we have is because we've already proven that the “do whatever you want and sue if it goes wrong” approach doesn't work well. The better question to debate is how to make those regulators more effective and responsive
This system has a long and defendable track record of encouraging assholes to commit small violations that are not worth suing over, while penalizing those that are considerate of others.
Absolutely - you don't want laws to be enforced too completely, but you also don't want to have lots of laws on the books which nobody obeys and are usually not enforced, but can be enforced selectively.
Homosexual acts were illegal until quite recently (~50 years or less) in most of the western world. If we had, hypothetically, 100% effective law enforcement, there could have never been a social movement to change that - everyone would be locked up.
Same with Cannabis - how could sufficient people have experienced it and realized that it wasn't as dangerous as promised, if everyone who tried it was locked up?
It's hard to change an unjust law without breaking it in the process - and we want unjust laws to be changed. So therefore we should enforce laws, but not completely, and have some discretion in how they're applied.
However, the alternate situation is also bad - if you have lots of laws, as we do now, which are rarely or never enforced, then you have a powerful hammer the authorities can bring down on anyone they like, since everyone is a criminal.
Let's say there is a law against walking your dog without a leash on, because it will prevent unruly dogs from scaring other people out in the public(even if the dogs intent is good, people may not understand this), or staring dog fights, or pooping where they shouldn't. Sounds good.
Now, what if someone has a perfectly trained dog, that will stay right at their owners side no matter what circumstance is presented, and that dog is walking without a leash on? Is it appropriate to give that person a ticket? They are breaking the letter of the law, but the intent of the law was not broken because of how well trained the dog is.
> Let's say there is a law against walking your dog without a leash on .... Is it appropriate to give that person a ticket
Yes, because that law was written for the convenience of law enforcement. The law should have been "You need to be able to control your dog at all times when in public, with a leach if necessary", or indeed, not there at all: There are plenty of laws on the books that penalises behaviour that hurts other people. But enforcing that is a lot more difficult than determining the absence of a leach and writing a ticket, regardless of whatever harm or risk is present in the actual situation.
You're suggesting that laws should be enforced in accordance with how they should have been written, not how they are written - and while obviously a good thing in this case, it also applies in the other direction: A policer officer might feel very strongly that beating unruly arrestees is what the law should be.
Rule of law means the laws are enforced as they are written, equally for everyone, not subject to the whims of law enforcement. Making stupid laws that implicitly demands law enforcement to be arbitrary is deeply corroding to the rule of law.
If you pass laws that have faults then rely on enforcement discretion to produce justice, that puts a lot of weight on the enforcers' shoulders.
Imagine being a cop who pulls over a poor black janitor for DUI. You know last week your colleague pulled over a rich white senator who was on his way home from the police union's fundraising ball, and let him off with a caution. If you arrest the janitor your department will look like a bunch of corrupt, racist, classists. And if you don't arrest any DUIs, all the problems caused by drunk driving will get laid at your department's doorstep.
Perhaps instead of passing laws that have faults then using enforcement discretion to work around those faults, instead we should improve the laws to be fault-free. (admittedly that might need a faster release and testing cycle than we have at the moment)
In a system where nearly everything is forbidden are burdensomely permitted, enforcement ends up targeting the most vulnerable in society (the poor, minorities, etc).
I think most Americans would be shocked if, overnight, every law on the books in the US, from income tax on cash income to street vendor permitting, to casual, personal drug usage, to hair salon certification laws, to laws against home poker games, were stringently and consistently enforced across the board. Half of Americans would be in prison or in court before the end of the year.
When I was in Europe last I assumed the cops just let all of that slide. That was until I got to Florence, where I saw undercover cops arrest a group selling prints outside the Uffuzi, complete with crash tackling those that tried to run away.
Unrelated but I always found it shocking the number of street sellers peddling counterfeit designer goods in Italy, seeing as luxury goods are such a huge industry in the country. I would have assumed that, of all places, Italy would have a zero-tolerance approach to counterfeits.
Do you mean this in a sense different from corruption? The loose enforcement of regulation is a very common goal of bribes, as famously depicted in mafia movies for instance.
Or do you talk of instances more like where the "good citizen" gets off with a warning despite breaking a rule that the "bad citizen" would be punished for?
The latter case seems more like sociology or ethnography to me, economists tend to not think so much of people as people after all.
Having witnessed the destruction of a street vendors stock when he failed to run quick enough the last time we were in Florence I don't think there is any tacit understanding.
Its a game of cat and mouse. And when the cat arrives the mouse loses out... But there are an awful lot of mice and very few cats...
It's not great that a private company is profiting off of crowdsourcing misdemeanours.
On the other hand where I live (Sydney), airport charges are a total rort. Trains to and from the city cost $17 (!) (versus $3 if you walk one stop). The taxi surcharge is $4. So... carry on.
Here in Lisbon, after getting the courts to ban Uber, our local taxi association just started lobbying for having a minimum (not flat) fee of 20€ for any ride starting from the airport - enough to pay for a ride across the city.
If it's anything like where I live (Brisbane), the airport railway line is privately owned as opposed to publically funded like the rest of the network. The service (maintenance and operations) is then contracted out and given that there's only one player (cityrail) it goes to them. As a result, the fare is much higher.
As a regular visitor from Auckland, I've wondered about that. Auckland's similarly mired in political crap, but at least Melbourne has an otherwise-functional train/tram network.
It'd be a lot nicer taking a train than those airport busses, although getting dropped at the station is nice.
The existing network is part of the problem. Options put forward include do nothing, new dedicated line from CBD to the airport, or branch off one of two existing lines in the area for a new airport spur line. Then you have to think about, how often can you run airport trains on existing lines? Do they go express or stop at stations? If they stop at stations, does it take too long for airport passengers?
None of them are hard questions, but in a partisan political environment where no parties can agree with each other, unless you can plan it in two years and build it in another 2, there's no way it's going to happen before next election.
I don't see that happening. The airport can only sustain so much road traffic before congestion becomes an issue and the ridesharing companies have the added issue in Australia of minimum wage requirements. That adds a whole lot of cost to the fares and really balances it back up (though still definitely cheaper than taxis).
The airport is such that the $15 ticket is really not going to be equalled by any sort of road-based transport, because the distance from the CBD is simply too great.
edit: I'm in this case referring to Brisbane airport, though I imagine that maps to many others given their generally remote proximity from CBDs.
You make really good points, it's just that if it costs $3 to get to one place and $17 to get to another (in fact if you are going FURTHER from the other direction, it costs just $4 to the CBD), one has to wonder why there's this enormous cost gradient, and whether that's just a question of consumer price-sensitivity.
Theoretically if roads were a problem a rational transport network would incentivise rail use, but in fact taxi use is effectively subsidised by about $10 due to the expense of trains.
I'm just talking about Sydney though, don't know about Brisbane.
Yeah, the "Airport Link Corporation" built and operated the line. Apparently it has paid for its capital costs and is now in its "revenue sharing" phase. NSW transport is keeping the surcharge to subsidise the rest of the network.
I tried to catch an Uber ride from Heathrow before, and it was a total nightmare in terms of not knowing where to go, having come out of the wrong exit, and the driver ending up in a car park. Really, the airports benefit from allowing them too, as they reduce traffic congestion and the number of confused people milling around looking for where their ride is...
I'm not a savvy nor a regular traveler. When recently I had to travel, back and forth airport to home in a suburb, I compared the uber and regular taxi prices. I didnt find any difference so I opted for regular taxi's flat rate. A regulated service gives a sort of confidence compared to anything else.
They took on an industry in which existing players were poorly serving consumers and have been providing a good product. Other potential competitors avoided the market due to the regulatory environment in the industry. Uber dealt with this by stating that they are exempt from the existing regulations.
I don't really trust Uber any further than I can throw my smartphone, but anything is better than a generic airport taxi. (At LGA, I've taken cabs more often than Atlanta -- it's harder to wait for Uber in the cold of winter -- and while I've never had any real trouble with Uber ever I've had two different taxi drivers pulled over and issued a ticket while I was in the taxi, both of them for running a red light on a left-hand-turn signal...)
Anyway. In conclusion: fuck you, Atlanta airport/government.