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Comment by creativename | Hacker News Reader

About taxi meters: from my experience, the mileage may be fixed, but it always seems that the cab driver is able to press something/manipulate the box somehow when they need to add additional fees (in Boston, specifically, in fact).

For instance, when I get picked up at many airports the cab driver adds some additional fee (usually between $3 and $8). For all I know, they're just making this number up - how would I know what the toll at the airport exit costs?

Also, many cabs have a list of flat rates for common routes (from Hotel X to airport - $35, etc.) It seems that in these cases it would be independent of whatever the meter says.

I guess these things make it seem questionable to me how much regulations on metering can actually matter. Is it just a matter of "if we catch you doing this (ie. someone reports questionable activity), we're going to revoke your license"?

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Cabs are generally required to have fare schedules including fees clearly visible to the rider, to prevent just this sort of scam.

Even if the user doesn't know the actual airport fare and the cabbie manages to scam a few riders unfamiliar with the true fare schedule, a tampered-with giant human-readable fare schedule is pretty easy for an inspector or frequent rider to detect and report.

Plus, as the user pays the cab driver on the way out, there's an opportunity for the user to review the charge and reject payment if the driver is scamming them.

With Uber, the payment takes place later and an e-mail receipt is sent, and the fares are seemingly intentionally obfuscated (see: the controversy about displaying peak v. off-peak pricing as a multiplier rather than a dollar amount). Hence, a driver using a malicious Uber Driver app to report a few more blocks travelled on each trip is much less likely to be detected than a cabbie physically and obviously entering additional fees. I suspect Uber would find it difficult to prove that the driver's (fake) extra mileage wasn't actually rider-requested or an attempt to circumvent traffic - and I also suspect most riders won't notice.

Regular cabbies try the obvious, physical "take the long way" scam often enough that I suspect a hard-to-track digital form of the same idea isn't far off.

With Uber you get an actual map of the route taken on your receipt, so it seems like a driver trying to pull a scam would be quickly discovered.

> With Uber, the payment takes place later and an e-mail receipt is sent, and the fares are seemingly intentionally obfuscated (see: the controversy about displaying peak v. off-peak pricing as a multiplier rather than a dollar amount). Hence, a driver using a malicious Uber Driver app to report a few more blocks travelled on each trip is much less likely to be detected than a cabbie physically and obviously entering additional fees. I suspect Uber would find it difficult to prove that the driver's (fake) extra mileage wasn't actually rider-requested or an attempt to circumvent traffic - and I also suspect most riders won't notice.

Au contraire, Uber provides you a much easier way to audit your ride, a detailed email receipt seconds after you leave the cab with a map, origin and destination addresses, breakdown of your fare, how it was paid, and a customer service email address. On your phone, you also get a couple survey questions about the ride (how was the car, driver, etc.) too.

https://skitch.com/bkerley/ecigm/skitched-20120814-192957

I haven't had to deal with them (Miami doesn't have Uber yet :( ) but I suspect that their customer service is more interested in customer happiness than pinching pennies. Since it's paid with a credit card, even if their customer support process breaks down, you still have a powerful recourse.

I'm unlikely to be able to identify a discrepancy on a map in an unfamiliar place - but the map-in-email feature does bring Uber much closer to a regulated cab meter, especially since it can be reviewed by a more knowledgeable person later.

It still doesn't match the "system audited by a supposedly independent government inspector" aspect of a regulated cab meter (i.e. to prevent Uber from using fake distance calculations), but Uber being dishonest is a lot less likely than a shady cab company, so I guess that's less of a concern.

I personally never used the map as my only Uber trips have been flat-rate (SFO to Palo Alto, where Uber is actually cheaper than a cab in some circumstances).

> I'm unlikely to be able to identify a discrepancy on a map in an unfamiliar place - but the map-in-email feature does bring Uber much closer to a regulated cab meter, especially since it can be reviewed by a more knowledgeable person later.

I suspect that the routing features in "Google Maps" would be useful.

I emailed their customer service about a minor issue (more of a feature request really), and got back a response within hours which included a credit to my account. I hadn't asked for- or felt I deserved- a penny, but apparently their customer service people did.

Slightly off topic, but worth noting: In Boston, the fees coming from the airport are insanely regulated...to be very expensive. But always the same amount of expensive. There's no funny business there (I think).

The fees look like they come out of nowhere because no cabbie ever explains them...but they don't explain them in large part because they're simply unavoidable. Making it more confusing is the fact that this fee (on the order of $8) is only levied on taxis going out of the airport, not into the airport. Finally, these fees are new, only from within the past few years - so if you've been traveling to Boston recently, you might have noticed a sudden fare increase without knowing why.

Why all of this nonsense with crazy high, one way airport fees? To pay for the Big Dig, of course. (Which, incidentally, made my taxi rides home shorter to the point that my fares dropped more than the price of the fee.)

At least in Boston, there is a strict rule about having a fixed cost for rides from/to the airport. Cabs aren't allowed to deviate from the posted rates for those.

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