Hacker News Reader

Comment by titlex | Hacker News Reader

Maybe they should actually find people who know how to drive first. I'm getting sick of these ridershares and their terrible drivers. I'm strictly speaking in San Francisco. It's ridiculous how many times they randomly stop in the middle of the street to pick someone up causing traffic jams or even stopping at a stop sign to drop or pick someone up. Plus all the illegal U-turns and crossing double yellow lines when they're not supposed to. I don't recall having this issue with cabs. It's almost unbearable to drive in the city now.

View on HN

It's called 'disruption' and is very hip in the Bay these days...

My experience is the exact opposite. Cabbies in the city act like they could do whatever they want on the road, whereas Lyft and Uber drivers are way more cautious.

Same here - tons of cabs just hog the road like it's their priviledge to park there.

I don't see lyft drivers doing this.... but then how do you know lyft drivers are even hogging the road? Even if they have the purple mustache then it's in the front. Uber?

Two days ago, my Lyft driver in LA started driving backwards on a busy street because he missed a turn; people were honking and stuff.

What did you rate him?

99 red balloons

5/5, sorry... I don't have a great explanation why. I think it has something to do with personal interaction. If it was over Ebay or something I wouldn't worry about giving low rating, but when I meet someone face to face and they are nice, then it's hard to rate low.

It's funny - because I've done the same thing. I've had drivers that hit the brakes way too hard, and were kind of annoyingly chatty - that I just didn't have the heart to downgrade, even though I realized that I probably hadn't had a great experience, and, they weren't the safest of drivers. But I just couldn't bring myself to give a black mark to someone who had tried so hard to be friendly.

Out of the four Lyft rides I've done so far all of the drivers were nice and didn't violate any laws. That said, none of them knew the streets very well and even with GPS I had to direct two or three of them. I've even heard of some drivers claiming it's good way to get to know a city. It should be the other way around, you know then city and then drive for Lyft.

Don't you rate drivers on Lyft? Shouldn't the rating system take care of this?

It sounds like titlex is another road user and not a Lyft customer. I think you have to be a customer to give a driver a rating.

It takes care of it the same way voting takes care of bad politicians in democracies.

We should look at the bigger picture though, past our subjective preferences.

Lyft/Uber should be exciting from a business perspective to the HN community because it represents a business model that has been uniquely enabled by changes in the landscape. Ten years ago, this business wouldn't work, but the rise of the smartphone, and then GPS implicitly enabled this entire new segment. People, for better or worse, no longer need to be trained taxi drivers to drive people around the city because of smartphone GPS.

The more interesting conversation is about how this trend could have been anticipated.

You've been able to use a phone to call a cab for a lot longer than 10 years.

I think mmxiii is saying that the phone+GPS combo has enabled people to become cab drivers, not to summon them. Previously, you'd either have to either be very familiar with geography, or purchase a GPS unit - probably not very expensive, but still an investment for a very part-time job.

In NYC, cabbies & Uber seem equally bad.

Flycleaners seems like the worst, though. They must put their drivers on unrealistic schedules that force them to drive like maniacs. They run red lights and swing around corners and high speeds and idle in bike lanes in packs.

Driving in San Francisco was always so pleasant too

I'll echo that for DC. If you don't know how to get from the watergate to union station via the most efficient route, or you have no business driving a cab.

This is the second time I've seen you complain about this trip. I lived near the Watergate hotel for several years and can tell you there is no automatic guaranteed efficient route to union station. The entirety of downtown dc and all of the monuments lie directly between those two endpoints. DC traffic can snarl up pretty quickly between the tourists and random motorcades and regular old downtown traffic. I'd cut them some slack.

I take the trip every day so I have a lot of data points. There is an efficient route to Union station from the Watergate that's almost never backed up: take Rock Creek Parkway, to Independence Ave, to I-395, exit 10 to D Street. You can be forgiven for taking Constitution, but if you take K or H, you're guaranteed to be stuck in traffic.

People who don't take this route, I imagine, either don't know Rock Creek Parkway opens to southbound traffic at 6:30 pm (I travel at 6:35), or don't know that while 395 is a mess on the VA side, it's usually clear sailing for the short stretch from Independence to D street. This isn't obscure. Rock Creek Parkway and 395 are the only freeways running across D.C. Anyone who is a professional driver should be intimately familiar with the traffic patterns on these two roads. At the very least, you shouldn't need me to give you turn-by-turns after telling you to take this route across the city.

Do DC taxi drivers ever take this route for you? My limited experience in DC taxis was not ideal.

I'd say 75% at least ask if I want to take Rock Creek Parkway (though yesterday, one got lost and took me to Virginia...) These are old guys who hang around the Kennedy Center/Watergate all day. I'd say it's flipped for ride-sharing services, where the driver almost always relies on the GPS (I take it Uber's GPS isn't very good--Waze suggests the correct route).

This is what I was wondering, Waze/Google has been unexpectedly good, I thought Uber might have less than amazing GPS.

I've noticed this on multiple occasions: Uber has pretty terrible built-in GPS. It almost always has my drivers taking the larger/busier roads even though they are less direct and more congested than side streets. It's like when Google Maps gives you the three possible routes, Uber often picks the equivalent of that weird third route that makes no sense.

Uber GPS is fucking terrible. It always suggests alleys in downtown DC.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com