9 ms·

New Yorkers Can Now Get Unlimited UberPool in Manhattan for $200

136 points by micaeloliveira 10y ago

koolba 10y ago
Note that this is uber pool and is limited to a section of Manhattan (below 125th street). It's $100 for two weeks or $200 for a month. Business idea! Sign up for unlimited uber rides and resell them for cash. Just stand on a corner where people are waiting for cabs, charge them $5 in cash to go where they want, and then call an uber pool for them.
- spyspy 10y ago
  Those people could just use Via for the exact same thing.
- jessriedel 10y ago
  Below 125th street is something like 80% of Manhattan's area and probably 90% of the population (including half of Harlem), so it's really not particularly limited. They just are cutting off the outskirts since there likely isn't a high enough density of UberPool users up there for it to make sense.
  - frewsxcv 10y ago
    90% of Manhattan? Maybe. 90% of NYC? Definitely not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City
JumpCrisscross 10y ago
The page comes up blank for me, likely due to my content blockers. Alternate link: https://www.timeout.com/newyork/blog/you-can-buy-unlimited-uberpool-passes-for-october-092616 https://www.timeout.com/newyork/blog/you-can-buy-unlimited-u...
- technofiend 10y ago
  We need a site ban for forbes.com due to their actively filtering people with ad blocking and history of serving up malware-laden ads. Thank you for the alternate link.
  - reacharavindh 10y ago
    Yes, I have a mental filter to just not click any links to forbes.com. If there were more people who feel the same way, may be we can avoid posting them to HN on account of convenience. (I have nothing against forbes. If they choose to not cater to people with ad blockers, it is their choice. But, I think it's HN community's choice to avoid them.)
  - SomeCollegeBro 10y ago
    I tried to read this article and I couldn't even finish the first sentence. They have a video advertisement with both a pause and a mute button that doesn't work. If you don't want people to ad block, perhaps consider ads that don't drive people away in the first place.
- Guest98123 10y ago
  With Firefox and uBlock Origin it's blank for about 20 seconds, and then forwards to the content.
- kaolinite 10y ago
  Interestingly I was getting occasional black screens (i.e. the entire screen, status bar and all) in Safari on iOS 10. Not seen that on any other site before.
johnnymonster 10y ago
laff, forbes won't let me use their site with an ad blocker.
- new299 10y ago
  You're lucky. You also get to avoid the autoplaying video with audio. I'd recommend the mods switch to the timeout link.
technofiend 10y ago
My median San Francisco uberpool fare was (rounded) $3. Assuming similar per-mile rates it doesn't take long to break even.
whenwillitstop 10y ago
I live in Manhattan. This is a rip off. The Uber Pool rides can take up to an hour sometimes, they drop off and pick up up to five people on your way. Uber if you are reading this, everyone in NYC realizes what a waste of time Uber Pool is.
- wtvanhest 10y ago
  Except for the people taking it...
- empath75 10y ago
  I thought uberpool was for commuters that were going to the same way every day.
  - sthatipamala 10y ago
    No its simply sharing a regular uberX ride on demand. It's not for (necessarily) daily carpooling.
- CoolGuySteve 10y ago
  How does Uber Pool even work during rush hour? Do you spend all day trapped in Times Square waiting to pick up the second person? Or does Uber try and route around gridlock? Does it just skip the other person if the car gets stuck? Or maybe I'm paranoid because of a bad experience trying to get to a job interview via cab my first time in NYC.
  - jacques_chester 10y ago
    Uber's wayfinding logic in Manhattan is actively dumb. With billions of dollars they could just hire a thousand locals to sit in a passenger seat to give navigation instructions. If a car is ahead of me on an avenue, even by half a street, it will send them around the block instead of suggesting I walk forward a bit. Or, instead of asking me to cross an avenue, it will send the driver down a different avenue for multiple streets to loop back to my position. It is obsessed with getting on to the expressways. It will happily crawl past relatively free-flowing avenues to squeeze into an expressway full of cars heading to Westchester. Its estimates of ETA seem to assume that there is no traffic. They are hilariously bad. Drivers, who have been burnt by customers getting mad at them for not going to an exact location or for "ripping them off", follow the map religiously. No matter what I text or call. They follow an app which was presumably written by people who've never set foot in this city.
ixtli 10y ago
Before you get all excited about this, it's ONLY UberPOOL and your destination must start and end in Manhattan. So if you use this to commute for two weeks you're paying 10 (edit: obviously 100/20 = 5, it's early. leave me alone) dollars flat for a cab ride that you share and will take longer than normal because of the overhead of splitting the ride. There are certainly some people for whom this will be cost effective, especially if they spend most of their day traveling to places they can be 5-10 minutes +/- their target arrival. However for people like me who live on the east side of Manhattan and commute to FiDi it doesn't actually save a worthwhile amount of money. Also forbes is incredibly spammy so here's the link directly to the promo: https://www.uber.com/info/plus/newyork/ https://www.uber.com/info/plus/newyork/
- empath75 10y ago
  if you go both ways, it's $5
- djrogers 10y ago
  You forgot that people commute 2 ways in your math, so 2 weeks of commutes would be 20 trips coming out to $5/trip, not 10.
  - morley 10y ago
    This is compared to ~$2.50 a trip on the subway, which (depending on which line you're near and whether you have a transfer) could take substantially less time than a car ride. There are however some "subway deserts" -- the upper-east and lower-east sides come to mind -- whose residences would greatly benefit from skipping two long walks a day.
    - hx87 10y ago
      For people who are intolerant of heat and odor like me, avoiding overcrowded and AC-less stations in the summer alone is worth the $2.50.
      - 10y ago
jflowers45 10y ago
Inaccurate clickbait title. How about "New Yorkers can now get unlimited UberPool inside Manhattan for $50/week"
toosmart4u12 10y ago
lol what a clickbait title. - Unlimited Uber rides nice!!! - They're Uber pool rides Oh... not as great, but still decent. - It's 100$ for the first 2 weeks.. then it's 200$ a month. Shit deal. No thank you.
apatters 10y ago
Not only is Forbes a publication which forces people to disable ad blockers and then serves them malware-laden ads, but they have also written a headline here which is misleading through omission of crucial details. At least I assume the headline on HN represents the Forbes headline accurately, but I don't know, because they won't let me read their content. I think that Forbes should be blacklisted on HN.
awesomerobot 10y ago
This is actually a worse deal compared to the existing Uber Pool Pass for people commuting to a 9-5 20/40 times a week — using that service put you at ~$4/ride. Interesting to see Uber attempting to compete at a slightly-more than public transit price, but it still seems unsustainable when it comes to paying drivers a fair wage.
merrvk 10y ago
Useful seeing as they dont know how to drive trains over there
chadlavi 10y ago
Only in Manhattan, and the $100 is only TWO weeks. A full month is $200. As one of the 80% of New Yorkers who live in the other 4 boroughs, this is useless to me.
- manacit 10y ago
  Not to mention that the part of town this is limited to is extremely well covered by almost every train, which will virtually always be faster (and cheaper) than getting into an Uber Pool that's going to hop around and pick people up.
  - vonmoltke 10y ago
    This is especially true for people like me (starting in November) who take the metro trains into Grand Central or Penn. The transfer to the subway from those is almost frictionless.
qntty 10y ago
$100 for a weird two-week initial period. Reads like: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
LAMike 10y ago
Ban fortune.com
devy 10y ago
Uber's privatization of public transits [1] at big cities now begins. [1]: http://www.inc.com/damon-brown/in-the-ultimate-coup-uber-takes-over-citys-mass-transit.html http://www.inc.com/damon-brown/in-the-ultimate-coup-uber-tak...
zaidf 10y ago
It is $200 this month. Chances are they will increase the price or put a cap the following month as they did in SF. The SF subscription isn't all that attractive anymore.
dorianm 10y ago
The title is correct now ($200 instead of $100), from Uber's website[1]: Unlimited uberPOOL in Manhattan/2 weeks ($100 fee) Unlimited uberPOOL in Manhattan/4 weeks ($200 fee) [1]: https://www.uber.com/info/plus/newyork/ https://www.uber.com/info/plus/newyork/
eli 10y ago
They rolled a version of this out in DC months ago with a marketing campaign cleverly tied to major track work on the Metro. http://dcinno.streetwise.co/2016/07/29/uber-dc-monthly-pass-during-metro-safetrack/ http://dcinno.streetwise.co/2016/07/29/uber-dc-monthly-pass-... Very reasonable price (I suspect, in fact, they lose money on it). Service is OK. I prefer to take a bus but not everyone has a convenient bus line.
- mikeash 10y ago
  They're pretty up front about losing money on it. "Uber had promised to invest $10 million in D.C. during the SafeTrack program in a mix of ways. That includes offering financial incentives for drivers while still discounting UberPool this summer in D.C. Some of the money applies to incentives for the Pool Pass as well, since otherwise drivers would not likely feel very motivated to take a $1 fare." It will be interesting to see how Uber shakes out in the long term. They can't keep this up forever.
  - eli 10y ago
    I have certainly seen it cause many more people to give Pool a try. They are (were?) doing a flat-rate $3 price with no commitment for Pool rides that start and end within a zone downtown and surrounding neighborhoods. Great deal.
thesimpsons1022 10y ago
i could see this really catching on IF employers paid for it as a benefit.
thenipper 10y ago
There is an irony in that the people that could easily afford to do this won't want to because they'll have to share the car...
untog 10y ago
There's probably something to be said here about Uber limiting this to Manhattan - by far and away the most subway-covered area of the city - and not somewhere like East New York that's crying out for transit. Of course, they do so to make money, and I don't begrudge them that. But it goes some way to highlight the fact that Uber is mostly certainly not a tide that raises all ships. (as an entirely different aside, the roads in Manhattan are already terrible, and the subway is already quicker for a lot of journeys. Once you add in the fact that the Pool takes you far out of your way... eh.)
rdlecler1 10y ago
I called an UberPool in Manhattan at around 3:00 on a weekday. It was a 10 minute wait and when it did arrive the car already had four other passengers in the car. In many cases it's much faster and cheaper to take the train/cab.

136 points by micaeloliveira 10y ago

Note that this is uber pool and is limited to a section of Manhattan (below 125th street). It's $100 for two weeks or $200 for a month. Business idea! Sign up for unlimited uber rides and resell them for cash. Just stand on a corner where people are waiting for cabs, charge them $5 in cash to go where they want, and then call an uber pool for them.

spyspy 10y ago
Those people could just use Via for the exact same thing.
jessriedel 10y ago
Below 125th street is something like 80% of Manhattan's area and probably 90% of the population (including half of Harlem), so it's really not particularly limited. They just are cutting off the outskirts since there likely isn't a high enough density of UberPool users up there for it to make sense.
- frewsxcv 10y ago
  90% of Manhattan? Maybe. 90% of NYC? Definitely not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City

JumpCrisscross 10y ago

The page comes up blank for me, likely due to my content blockers. Alternate link: https://www.timeout.com/newyork/blog/you-can-buy-unlimited-uberpool-passes-for-october-092616 https://www.timeout.com/newyork/blog/you-can-buy-unlimited-u...

technofiend 10y ago
We need a site ban for forbes.com due to their actively filtering people with ad blocking and history of serving up malware-laden ads. Thank you for the alternate link.
- reacharavindh 10y ago
  Yes, I have a mental filter to just not click any links to forbes.com. If there were more people who feel the same way, may be we can avoid posting them to HN on account of convenience. (I have nothing against forbes. If they choose to not cater to people with ad blockers, it is their choice. But, I think it's HN community's choice to avoid them.)
- SomeCollegeBro 10y ago
  I tried to read this article and I couldn't even finish the first sentence. They have a video advertisement with both a pause and a mute button that doesn't work. If you don't want people to ad block, perhaps consider ads that don't drive people away in the first place.
Guest98123 10y ago
With Firefox and uBlock Origin it's blank for about 20 seconds, and then forwards to the content.
kaolinite 10y ago
Interestingly I was getting occasional black screens (i.e. the entire screen, status bar and all) in Safari on iOS 10. Not seen that on any other site before.

johnnymonster 10y ago

laff, forbes won't let me use their site with an ad blocker.

new299 10y ago
You're lucky. You also get to avoid the autoplaying video with audio. I'd recommend the mods switch to the timeout link.

technofiend 10y ago

My median San Francisco uberpool fare was (rounded) $3. Assuming similar per-mile rates it doesn't take long to break even.

whenwillitstop 10y ago

I live in Manhattan. This is a rip off. The Uber Pool rides can take up to an hour sometimes, they drop off and pick up up to five people on your way. Uber if you are reading this, everyone in NYC realizes what a waste of time Uber Pool is.

wtvanhest 10y ago
Except for the people taking it...
empath75 10y ago
I thought uberpool was for commuters that were going to the same way every day.
- sthatipamala 10y ago
  No its simply sharing a regular uberX ride on demand. It's not for (necessarily) daily carpooling.
CoolGuySteve 10y ago
How does Uber Pool even work during rush hour? Do you spend all day trapped in Times Square waiting to pick up the second person? Or does Uber try and route around gridlock? Does it just skip the other person if the car gets stuck? Or maybe I'm paranoid because of a bad experience trying to get to a job interview via cab my first time in NYC.
- jacques_chester 10y ago
  Uber's wayfinding logic in Manhattan is actively dumb. With billions of dollars they could just hire a thousand locals to sit in a passenger seat to give navigation instructions. If a car is ahead of me on an avenue, even by half a street, it will send them around the block instead of suggesting I walk forward a bit. Or, instead of asking me to cross an avenue, it will send the driver down a different avenue for multiple streets to loop back to my position. It is obsessed with getting on to the expressways. It will happily crawl past relatively free-flowing avenues to squeeze into an expressway full of cars heading to Westchester. Its estimates of ETA seem to assume that there is no traffic. They are hilariously bad. Drivers, who have been burnt by customers getting mad at them for not going to an exact location or for "ripping them off", follow the map religiously. No matter what I text or call. They follow an app which was presumably written by people who've never set foot in this city.

ixtli 10y ago

Before you get all excited about this, it's ONLY UberPOOL and your destination must start and end in Manhattan. So if you use this to commute for two weeks you're paying 10 (edit: obviously 100/20 = 5, it's early. leave me alone) dollars flat for a cab ride that you share and will take longer than normal because of the overhead of splitting the ride. There are certainly some people for whom this will be cost effective, especially if they spend most of their day traveling to places they can be 5-10 minutes +/- their target arrival. However for people like me who live on the east side of Manhattan and commute to FiDi it doesn't actually save a worthwhile amount of money. Also forbes is incredibly spammy so here's the link directly to the promo: https://www.uber.com/info/plus/newyork/ https://www.uber.com/info/plus/newyork/

empath75 10y ago
if you go both ways, it's $5
djrogers 10y ago
You forgot that people commute 2 ways in your math, so 2 weeks of commutes would be 20 trips coming out to $5/trip, not 10.
- morley 10y ago
  This is compared to ~$2.50 a trip on the subway, which (depending on which line you're near and whether you have a transfer) could take substantially less time than a car ride. There are however some "subway deserts" -- the upper-east and lower-east sides come to mind -- whose residences would greatly benefit from skipping two long walks a day.
  - hx87 10y ago
    For people who are intolerant of heat and odor like me, avoiding overcrowded and AC-less stations in the summer alone is worth the $2.50.
    - 10y ago

jflowers45 10y ago

Inaccurate clickbait title. How about "New Yorkers can now get unlimited UberPool inside Manhattan for $50/week"

toosmart4u12 10y ago

lol what a clickbait title. - Unlimited Uber rides nice!!! - They're Uber pool rides Oh... not as great, but still decent. - It's 100$ for the first 2 weeks.. then it's 200$ a month. Shit deal. No thank you.

apatters 10y ago

Not only is Forbes a publication which forces people to disable ad blockers and then serves them malware-laden ads, but they have also written a headline here which is misleading through omission of crucial details. At least I assume the headline on HN represents the Forbes headline accurately, but I don't know, because they won't let me read their content. I think that Forbes should be blacklisted on HN.

awesomerobot 10y ago

This is actually a worse deal compared to the existing Uber Pool Pass for people commuting to a 9-5 20/40 times a week — using that service put you at ~$4/ride. Interesting to see Uber attempting to compete at a slightly-more than public transit price, but it still seems unsustainable when it comes to paying drivers a fair wage.

merrvk 10y ago

Useful seeing as they dont know how to drive trains over there

chadlavi 10y ago

Only in Manhattan, and the $100 is only TWO weeks. A full month is $200. As one of the 80% of New Yorkers who live in the other 4 boroughs, this is useless to me.

manacit 10y ago
Not to mention that the part of town this is limited to is extremely well covered by almost every train, which will virtually always be faster (and cheaper) than getting into an Uber Pool that's going to hop around and pick people up.
- vonmoltke 10y ago
  This is especially true for people like me (starting in November) who take the metro trains into Grand Central or Penn. The transfer to the subway from those is almost frictionless.

qntty 10y ago

$100 for a weird two-week initial period. Reads like: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

LAMike 10y ago

Ban fortune.com

devy 10y ago

Uber's privatization of public transits [1] at big cities now begins. [1]: http://www.inc.com/damon-brown/in-the-ultimate-coup-uber-takes-over-citys-mass-transit.html http://www.inc.com/damon-brown/in-the-ultimate-coup-uber-tak...

zaidf 10y ago

It is $200 this month. Chances are they will increase the price or put a cap the following month as they did in SF. The SF subscription isn't all that attractive anymore.

dorianm 10y ago

The title is correct now ($200 instead of $100), from Uber's website[1]: Unlimited uberPOOL in Manhattan/2 weeks ($100 fee) Unlimited uberPOOL in Manhattan/4 weeks ($200 fee) [1]: https://www.uber.com/info/plus/newyork/ https://www.uber.com/info/plus/newyork/

eli 10y ago

They rolled a version of this out in DC months ago with a marketing campaign cleverly tied to major track work on the Metro. http://dcinno.streetwise.co/2016/07/29/uber-dc-monthly-pass-during-metro-safetrack/ http://dcinno.streetwise.co/2016/07/29/uber-dc-monthly-pass-... Very reasonable price (I suspect, in fact, they lose money on it). Service is OK. I prefer to take a bus but not everyone has a convenient bus line.

mikeash 10y ago
They're pretty up front about losing money on it. "Uber had promised to invest $10 million in D.C. during the SafeTrack program in a mix of ways. That includes offering financial incentives for drivers while still discounting UberPool this summer in D.C. Some of the money applies to incentives for the Pool Pass as well, since otherwise drivers would not likely feel very motivated to take a $1 fare." It will be interesting to see how Uber shakes out in the long term. They can't keep this up forever.
- eli 10y ago
  I have certainly seen it cause many more people to give Pool a try. They are (were?) doing a flat-rate $3 price with no commitment for Pool rides that start and end within a zone downtown and surrounding neighborhoods. Great deal.

thesimpsons1022 10y ago

i could see this really catching on IF employers paid for it as a benefit.

thenipper 10y ago

There is an irony in that the people that could easily afford to do this won't want to because they'll have to share the car...

untog 10y ago

There's probably something to be said here about Uber limiting this to Manhattan - by far and away the most subway-covered area of the city - and not somewhere like East New York that's crying out for transit. Of course, they do so to make money, and I don't begrudge them that. But it goes some way to highlight the fact that Uber is mostly certainly not a tide that raises all ships. (as an entirely different aside, the roads in Manhattan are already terrible, and the subway is already quicker for a lot of journeys. Once you add in the fact that the Pool takes you far out of your way... eh.)

rdlecler1 10y ago

I called an UberPool in Manhattan at around 3:00 on a weekday. It was a 10 minute wait and when it did arrive the car already had four other passengers in the car. In many cases it's much faster and cheaper to take the train/cab.