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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 a

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.
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  I thought they used google. Anyway, NYers are notorious for having strong opinions about the 'right way' to navigate any given route. Grain of salt.
  - jacques_chester 10y ago
    Last time I complained about this, someone blamed it on Apple Maps. Some drivers have both, mostly so they can see the traffic data from Google Maps. I like those drivers. Edit: I'd actually be surprised if it was Google Maps at fault, given that their Maps team has a large contingent in the NYC office.
    - CPLX 10y ago
      Things dramatically improved recently when they added a link to Waze in the Uber app. And by improved I mean the drivers went from genuinely lost, misdirected, and clueless to merely confused and unaware of their surroundings but traveling vaguely in the right direction.
  - ryanworl 10y ago
    Uber Pool gives a route in-app that is displayed to each rider. Drivers don't deviate from this because other passengers will be added along the way and their path needs to be relatively predictable I would imagine. I don't know how the route is determined in-app, but at least for Uber Pool in Manhattan, they are not using Google Maps as much anymore except for stuff like traffic information.
  - roguecoder 10y ago
    I know my Mini with "Google-backed" maps sometimes has terrible taste in routes and very out-of-date traffic info compared to actual Google Maps. I wouldn't be surprised if somehow the API isn't the same quality as the direct maps results.
- CPLX 10y ago
  Yeah Uber's navigation in Manhattan and Brooklyn is unusually bad in my experience. The last incident that truly soured me on Uber Pool was when it tried to take me from Downtown Brooklyn into Manhattan to drop the other guy off before me, when I was going to Brooklyn Heights. Um. That, however was only my second worst Pool experience, not nearly as surreal as the driver who spoke nearly no English, and didn't actually understand the basic concept of Uber Pool. So I get in, then it prompts him to pick up another passenger, but he doesn't understand so he drives to the spot and expects me to get out. I try to explain that he just drove by the woman he was supposed to pick up, and after much confusion, she gets in the car. The driver thinks she's a friend of mine, and doesn't understand that we're now going to two different destinations sequentially. Then it prompts him to pick up someone else. It would have been more painful if it wasn't sort of mildly amusing. Oh wait that might be tied for second with the time that I was headed down Canal leisurely when the app pinged indicating a new passenger, and prompting the driver to take an immediate right, which caught him off guard a little and he veered right into the Holland Tunnel approaches. Thankfully I was paying attention and immediately vocal enough to get him to stop and escape by moving a few traffic cones. Your average tourist would have been blissfully headed for New Jersey in that scenario. Or, in other words, Uber needs to stop spending so much time fantasizing about valuations and robot cars and actually improve their product. I have no idea why they're spending so much to theoretically develop a monopoly when ever user in this town at least is developing many reasons to bolt to a credible competitor on moment's notice.
  - jacques_chester 10y ago
    They're betting on self-driving cars. My expectation is that self-driving cars will be promptly disintermediated. "Google Rides", maybe, or "Amazon Prime for People", scatter-gathering over thousands of small companies owning 1 or 2 cars. Prices will fall to the marginal return. Uber's investor fountain will run dry and they'll be stuck with the same economics as everyone else. There will be no brand loyalty once price-finding apps enter the fray. They'll still be a major competitor, but the fevered dreams won't pan out.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  I'm not sure if "ask the destination to move" is technically a routing/mapping problem. Uber tries to get the car to come to you, you being defined as a lat/long pair, not as a presumably bipedal primate. They might be assuming that their customers don't want to have to walk around to make it more convenient for the driver. (And what if, in fact, you're not bipedal, but use a wheelchair and might not be able to cross any arbitrary street to get to your driver?)
  - jacques_chester 10y ago
    As a customer, I care about literally none of what they do to model the problem. I only care that it is self-evidently dumb. It wastes 5 minutes to achieve what can be done in 5 seconds. If I'm in a wheelchair I can tap "no thanks" or set a setting or whatnot. If it's discriminatory (it might been seen as such), invert the setting so that's opt-out by default.
  - ryanworl 10y ago
    Uber Pool in Manhattan during commuter hours (and potentially other hours?) gives you a location to walk to. They also do not drop you off precisely at your destination. Roughly +/- 2 blocks. Edit: Incidentally, this is the reason Lyft Line is so terrible commuting in Manhattan. Pickup and dropoff locations are completely arbitrary, which slows everything down for everyone when compared to arranging pickups/dropoffs on easily reachable corners.
    - pavel_lishin 10y ago
      Ah, I didn't know that.
- SilasX 10y ago
  It's the same in SF! One time I dropped the pin at the end of a block on a one-way street, near its intersection with a two-way street. The driver it gave me was literally a block away and could have come down the two-way street, only requiring me to walk five steps over to that intersection. Instead, it kept him on the parallel street one block over and then had him loop over three blocks, one of which was a major street, all to save me from taking those five steps. I asked the driver about it and he said he was planning to just take the short route, but a) most people aren't ready, and b) it's safer from a rating perspective to follow the given route.
- roguecoder 10y ago
  It's particularly baffling since Manhattan is the only place I've been where taxis are a credible competitor. UberX isn't, in my experience, cheaper than the cabs and even X is slower than hailing a cab. The last time I tried to used Pool, it assigned me a driver 20 minutes away; I could have walked the route before the driver got there. Every other American city I've visited, cabs are impossible to hail and twice the price, but in NYC there are options.
potatolicious 10y ago
> "How does Uber Pool even work during rush hour?" I haven't used it during rush hour myself, but I know some people who have. The short answer is: it doesn't work during rush hour. All of the issues you've highlighted are issues, but even without some exceptional traffic just picking up and dropping off multiple people makes the whole thing interminably slow. Not to mention that Manhattan below 125th St is subway central - I can see the value for people in Brooklyn and Queens who live in subway deserts, but Manhattan? Even regular non-pool Uber is already slower than taking the train during rush hour. I can appreciate that uberpool is a great thing for people in other cities, but the product market fit for Manhattan is exceptionally poor. I wonder why Uber is bothering with this market when there are many others (see: SF) where this "unlimited pass" would be actually useful.
- CPLX 10y ago
  It's useful for people who work out on the west side highway like at IAC or in the Starrett-Leigh building and live on like Avenue D or something. Or other similar oddly crosstown commutes that aren't necessarily gridlocked. Or people who work in hospitality like bartenders and so on who have to otherwise take a couple trains to get home. Which, I guess, is a use case.
- travisp 10y ago
  I've taken a taxi or Uber in Manhattan even when a train would be faster when I have a business call I need to take. I know that cell service/internet availability is a reason others I know will sometimes choose to take a car. I don't know that I would take UberPool however.
Tiktaalik 10y ago
I'm deeply skeptical about the viability of these sort of car sharing networks (autonomously driven or otherwise) for this reason. This doesn't scale when everyone is trying to use the service and the street capacity for cars is fixed.
- aub3bhat 10y ago
  NO that's not how it works, in fact the street capacity of cars being fixed is the very reason why car sharing networks are awesome, otherwise you are stuck in current situation where each individual has his/her own car leading to traffic and congestion.
  - Tiktaalik 10y ago
    There's a decrease in traffic from car sharing from what you state, moving from a single individual in a car to several in a car, however the overall capacity of the road remains fixed. If car sharing networks become popular in comparison to public transit, then the amount of cars will increase and this will eventually come in conflict with the physical limits of the road network.
  - lloyd-christmas 10y ago
    > otherwise you are stuck in current situation where each individual has his/her own car leading to traffic and congestion. This is a terrible assumption. The deal being offered is Manhattan -> Manhattan, and only below 125th street. That's a population of ~1m people[0], which doesn't even factor in age demographics. There are 1.6m commuters into manhattan each day and only 225k cars registered in manhattan[1]. Only 30% of employees in manhattan live in manhattan[2]. Basically, the share of people using uberpool will almost exclusively come from pre-existing public transportation. [0] https://dmv.ny.gov/statistic/2015reginforce-web.pdf https://dmv.ny.gov/statistic/2015reginforce-web.pdf [1] https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/cancer/registry/appendix/neighborhoodpop.htm https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/cancer/registry/appendi... [2] http://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/commuting/index.html http://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/commuting/index...
allengeorge 10y ago
I never bother taking Uber during rush hour. You'll take as long (or longer) as taking the subway. I guess the only advantage is that you don't have to share your personal space with plebs like me who take mass transit :P

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.

JoeAltmaier 10y ago
I thought they used google. Anyway, NYers are notorious for having strong opinions about the 'right way' to navigate any given route. Grain of salt.
- jacques_chester 10y ago
  Last time I complained about this, someone blamed it on Apple Maps. Some drivers have both, mostly so they can see the traffic data from Google Maps. I like those drivers. Edit: I'd actually be surprised if it was Google Maps at fault, given that their Maps team has a large contingent in the NYC office.
  - CPLX 10y ago
    Things dramatically improved recently when they added a link to Waze in the Uber app. And by improved I mean the drivers went from genuinely lost, misdirected, and clueless to merely confused and unaware of their surroundings but traveling vaguely in the right direction.
- ryanworl 10y ago
  Uber Pool gives a route in-app that is displayed to each rider. Drivers don't deviate from this because other passengers will be added along the way and their path needs to be relatively predictable I would imagine. I don't know how the route is determined in-app, but at least for Uber Pool in Manhattan, they are not using Google Maps as much anymore except for stuff like traffic information.
- roguecoder 10y ago
  I know my Mini with "Google-backed" maps sometimes has terrible taste in routes and very out-of-date traffic info compared to actual Google Maps. I wouldn't be surprised if somehow the API isn't the same quality as the direct maps results.
CPLX 10y ago
Yeah Uber's navigation in Manhattan and Brooklyn is unusually bad in my experience. The last incident that truly soured me on Uber Pool was when it tried to take me from Downtown Brooklyn into Manhattan to drop the other guy off before me, when I was going to Brooklyn Heights. Um. That, however was only my second worst Pool experience, not nearly as surreal as the driver who spoke nearly no English, and didn't actually understand the basic concept of Uber Pool. So I get in, then it prompts him to pick up another passenger, but he doesn't understand so he drives to the spot and expects me to get out. I try to explain that he just drove by the woman he was supposed to pick up, and after much confusion, she gets in the car. The driver thinks she's a friend of mine, and doesn't understand that we're now going to two different destinations sequentially. Then it prompts him to pick up someone else. It would have been more painful if it wasn't sort of mildly amusing. Oh wait that might be tied for second with the time that I was headed down Canal leisurely when the app pinged indicating a new passenger, and prompting the driver to take an immediate right, which caught him off guard a little and he veered right into the Holland Tunnel approaches. Thankfully I was paying attention and immediately vocal enough to get him to stop and escape by moving a few traffic cones. Your average tourist would have been blissfully headed for New Jersey in that scenario. Or, in other words, Uber needs to stop spending so much time fantasizing about valuations and robot cars and actually improve their product. I have no idea why they're spending so much to theoretically develop a monopoly when ever user in this town at least is developing many reasons to bolt to a credible competitor on moment's notice.
- jacques_chester 10y ago
  They're betting on self-driving cars. My expectation is that self-driving cars will be promptly disintermediated. "Google Rides", maybe, or "Amazon Prime for People", scatter-gathering over thousands of small companies owning 1 or 2 cars. Prices will fall to the marginal return. Uber's investor fountain will run dry and they'll be stuck with the same economics as everyone else. There will be no brand loyalty once price-finding apps enter the fray. They'll still be a major competitor, but the fevered dreams won't pan out.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
pavel_lishin 10y ago
I'm not sure if "ask the destination to move" is technically a routing/mapping problem. Uber tries to get the car to come to you, you being defined as a lat/long pair, not as a presumably bipedal primate. They might be assuming that their customers don't want to have to walk around to make it more convenient for the driver. (And what if, in fact, you're not bipedal, but use a wheelchair and might not be able to cross any arbitrary street to get to your driver?)
- jacques_chester 10y ago
  As a customer, I care about literally none of what they do to model the problem. I only care that it is self-evidently dumb. It wastes 5 minutes to achieve what can be done in 5 seconds. If I'm in a wheelchair I can tap "no thanks" or set a setting or whatnot. If it's discriminatory (it might been seen as such), invert the setting so that's opt-out by default.
- ryanworl 10y ago
  Uber Pool in Manhattan during commuter hours (and potentially other hours?) gives you a location to walk to. They also do not drop you off precisely at your destination. Roughly +/- 2 blocks. Edit: Incidentally, this is the reason Lyft Line is so terrible commuting in Manhattan. Pickup and dropoff locations are completely arbitrary, which slows everything down for everyone when compared to arranging pickups/dropoffs on easily reachable corners.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    Ah, I didn't know that.
SilasX 10y ago
It's the same in SF! One time I dropped the pin at the end of a block on a one-way street, near its intersection with a two-way street. The driver it gave me was literally a block away and could have come down the two-way street, only requiring me to walk five steps over to that intersection. Instead, it kept him on the parallel street one block over and then had him loop over three blocks, one of which was a major street, all to save me from taking those five steps. I asked the driver about it and he said he was planning to just take the short route, but a) most people aren't ready, and b) it's safer from a rating perspective to follow the given route.
roguecoder 10y ago
It's particularly baffling since Manhattan is the only place I've been where taxis are a credible competitor. UberX isn't, in my experience, cheaper than the cabs and even X is slower than hailing a cab. The last time I tried to used Pool, it assigned me a driver 20 minutes away; I could have walked the route before the driver got there. Every other American city I've visited, cabs are impossible to hail and twice the price, but in NYC there are options.

potatolicious 10y ago

> "How does Uber Pool even work during rush hour?" I haven't used it during rush hour myself, but I know some people who have. The short answer is: it doesn't work during rush hour. All of the issues you've highlighted are issues, but even without some exceptional traffic just picking up and dropping off multiple people makes the whole thing interminably slow. Not to mention that Manhattan below 125th St is subway central - I can see the value for people in Brooklyn and Queens who live in subway deserts, but Manhattan? Even regular non-pool Uber is already slower than taking the train during rush hour. I can appreciate that uberpool is a great thing for people in other cities, but the product market fit for Manhattan is exceptionally poor. I wonder why Uber is bothering with this market when there are many others (see: SF) where this "unlimited pass" would be actually useful.

CPLX 10y ago
It's useful for people who work out on the west side highway like at IAC or in the Starrett-Leigh building and live on like Avenue D or something. Or other similar oddly crosstown commutes that aren't necessarily gridlocked. Or people who work in hospitality like bartenders and so on who have to otherwise take a couple trains to get home. Which, I guess, is a use case.
travisp 10y ago
I've taken a taxi or Uber in Manhattan even when a train would be faster when I have a business call I need to take. I know that cell service/internet availability is a reason others I know will sometimes choose to take a car. I don't know that I would take UberPool however.

Tiktaalik 10y ago

I'm deeply skeptical about the viability of these sort of car sharing networks (autonomously driven or otherwise) for this reason. This doesn't scale when everyone is trying to use the service and the street capacity for cars is fixed.

aub3bhat 10y ago
NO that's not how it works, in fact the street capacity of cars being fixed is the very reason why car sharing networks are awesome, otherwise you are stuck in current situation where each individual has his/her own car leading to traffic and congestion.
- Tiktaalik 10y ago
  There's a decrease in traffic from car sharing from what you state, moving from a single individual in a car to several in a car, however the overall capacity of the road remains fixed. If car sharing networks become popular in comparison to public transit, then the amount of cars will increase and this will eventually come in conflict with the physical limits of the road network.
- lloyd-christmas 10y ago
  > otherwise you are stuck in current situation where each individual has his/her own car leading to traffic and congestion. This is a terrible assumption. The deal being offered is Manhattan -> Manhattan, and only below 125th street. That's a population of ~1m people[0], which doesn't even factor in age demographics. There are 1.6m commuters into manhattan each day and only 225k cars registered in manhattan[1]. Only 30% of employees in manhattan live in manhattan[2]. Basically, the share of people using uberpool will almost exclusively come from pre-existing public transportation. [0] https://dmv.ny.gov/statistic/2015reginforce-web.pdf https://dmv.ny.gov/statistic/2015reginforce-web.pdf [1] https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/cancer/registry/appendix/neighborhoodpop.htm https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/cancer/registry/appendi... [2] http://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/commuting/index.html http://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/commuting/index...

allengeorge 10y ago

I never bother taking Uber during rush hour. You'll take as long (or longer) as taking the subway. I guess the only advantage is that you don't have to share your personal space with plebs like me who take mass transit :P