5 ms·

How does customer need to counteract if he needs a time sensitive ride? Lets say, I need to go to Airport at time x. Neither I can book earlier to guarantee a r

• rconti 11y ago
  Well, typically 5 minutes won't hurt your airport trip. I've only paid surge pricing a couple of times in dozens of Uber trips, and both times it was post-bar hours in Redondo Beach, and the 2x surge price was still far cheaper than here in SF.
• cobalt 11y ago
  one unbecomes such a customer and perhaps utilizes a service of a lesser price, or sucks it up and pays the extra fee
• monort 11y ago
  Use a transfer service, which offers pre-orders. Uber is losing all my airport rides because they don't have it.
  • TeMPOraL 11y ago
    They probably don't want it anyway. It's more profitable for both Uber and the drivers to not take such rides; in the time to and back from airport they could take several within the city.
    • elcct 11y ago
      Also it is too risky - for example if they won't make it in time
    • monort 11y ago
      If it's profitable for a generic limousine transfer services, why it's not profitable for Uber? Blacklane seems to be profitable too.
      • ssharp 11y ago
        I need to take a transfer from Fort Lauderdale airport to Miami in a few weeks and was looking at pricing. Uber was definitely the cheapest, assuming no surge pricing. A scheduled private car is going to be close to $30 more than an Uber.
      • hkmurakami 11y ago
        I'd imagine something related to price segregation and bundle pricing.
      • skimpycompiler 11y ago
        Logistics of planning all those orders and rides is expensive.
        • Retric 11y ago
          Sounds like a job for software.
          • skimpycompiler 11y ago
            It'd be interesting to see how someone handles vehicle routing problem on a large scale, quickly and optimally.
            • TeMPOraL 11y ago
              Isn't that a solved problem since like the early 70s? Even computing power is not a limiting factor now, only those pesky humans bickering about "central planning" and "democratization".
              • skimpycompiler 11y ago
                Haha, solved? Put in the time windows, put the capacity limits, put the pickup and delivery (this isn't same as just delivery). It's far from solved, and far from efficient. Field isn't even mature as theoretical computer science, not even rigorous enough :D You have papers talking about their newest hybrid genetic memetic evolutionary deep simulated annealing bullcrap algorithm getting hundreds of citations. You have services like Routific, Routyn, Viamente, WorkWave, and others struggling with it. No one in this world has the technology powerful enough to optimize at scale. Example. WorkWave is talking about exploiting 45Billion dollar market of optimizing thousands of technicians and their routes, but they can't even scale that on a daily basis for large number of delivery points, given how slow their optimization engine is. Same goes for every service mentioned above. Oh yeah, WorkWave bought Viamente for $4M, that's how much their tech was worth. Seems a little bit low for something that could attack the 45Billion market. I have not stumbled upon a single one in the last 10 years that has any potential. All are leeching or would like to leech the big companies that can afford a 1 day waiting time for optimization. UPS seems to be all happy about its routing engine, but they too are being weird about it, if it's good then show it. Someone who solves this for Uber will definitely get its first billion. This would be a huge engineering effort since the problem is NP-hard :D
• peteretep 11y ago
  One uses the many minicab or prebooked services instead? Uber exists for the use case of needing a car right now. Needing a car later was a pretty well served use case in most of the world