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When I use lyft now, I'm coming across drivers that only drive for lyft. The tide has definitely shifted against Uber. I'm not really sure there's a way back at

• tptacek 9y ago
  If Lyft had a black car option, I'd use them constantly; I wonder what keeps them from rolling that out.
  • Cyph0n 9y ago
    Why do you need black cars specifically? More professional?
    • koolba 9y ago
      Not GP but I use them for clients. For personal use I'd be fine with a rickshaw.
      • lern_too_spel 9y ago
        At this point, some clients would be offended just for ordering an Uber for them, black car or not.
        • paulddraper 9y ago
          Huh? Why?
          • Theodores 9y ago
            If you are in London and you have got to get that famous child prodigy to the film studio with chaperone and teacher then you will be ordering them an Addison Lee private hire vehicle or better. A regular cab or some unlicenced 'Uber' gig-economy 'cab' isn't going to cut it. I expect that other parts of the world are the same.
            • xapata 9y ago
              That's not really in the spirit of the question. That same famous child prodigy with chaperone might be upset if you brought them a coke without pouring it in a crystal glass. My reading of the "Why?" question was curiosity about more typical clients.
            • DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
              I had an UberLUX in London a few months ago and I had a very nice experience with a professional chauffeur (complete with black suit) in a Mercedes S-Class. Uber services aren't all Priuses with signs saying "Please rate 5-stars!" hanging off the front-seat head-restraints.
              • cjrp 9y ago
                Yeh, in my experience UberLUX cars in London have all been chauffeurs picking up Uber work between booked chauffeur jobs.
            • MagnumOpus 9y ago
              > an Addison Lee private hire vehicle As a Londoner: Huh? AddLee minicab drivers are infamous for being even more aggressive/xenophobic/inappropriate than black cab veterans. "Premium" they ain't. But sure, if you want good service for the pampered "talent", you get a premium German private hire car, not the average Essex barrowboy...
          • lern_too_spel 9y ago
            Have you seen the #DeleteUber backlash? Do you think the people who participated in that would appreciate having an Uber called for them?
    • tdumitrescu 9y ago
      Not the poster you're responding to, but in my experience the black car service is head and shoulders above uberx or normal lyft - drivers actually _know_ the cities they're driving in, there's no bs about tipping or wanting you to go to some odd pickup location that's more convenient for them, or canceling sketchily because your destination is out of their way. It's just press a button, get a reliable professional ride, no hassle, which was uber's original value proposition, but which you can't get with their standard service anymore.
  • pocketstar 9y ago
    Try Lyft Premier: https://blog.lyft.com/posts/introducing-lyft-premier https://blog.lyft.com/posts/introducing-lyft-premier Or do you explicitly want a black car...?
    • tptacek 9y ago
      I explicitly want a commercially-licensed driver, which is what you get with Uber Black.
• spike021 9y ago
  Odd. I'm in the Bay Area and have taken many Lyft's lately both in the south bay and also the peninsula. Usually the drivers I get drive for both even up to this point. Could just be regional, not really sure? I feel like even with Uber's issues many drivers who do ride-sharing as a "job" won't want to just drop Uber as it may mean losing out on income (not sure if they can make up the loss with driving more for Lyft).
  • goobynight 9y ago
    People doing ride sharing as their main gig in your area are likely desperate for every extra dollar. I'd say they would be one of the last places to transition.
  • justinzollars 9y ago
    Also odd. I'm in San Francisco and I've found most drivers that only drive for Lyft too. When I talk to drivers (now I talk with every driver out of curiosity), they genuinely hate Uber. Maybe they were once Uber, but they've moved networks.
    • mahyarm 9y ago
      How often do you use uber?
    • rtx 9y ago
      Maybe they are confirming to leading questions.
  • neon_electro 9y ago
    I'm in Philadelphia and for a few months drove ~2,000 business miles for Lyft only, 0 for Uber. Not sure how much that's worth. I considered driving for Uber as well, but only if I planned to drive tens of thousands of business miles, which I decided not to do at all (got a job). As a passenger, I exclusively use Lyft.
  • Larrikin 9y ago
    In Chicago and Richmond atleast the drivers I've talked to that are doing it for a full time job tend to drive Uber, Lyft and every other small start up in the area. The drivers that aren't just getting started said they use Uber for volume but will take a Lyft over Uber because of the better pay. The only drivers I've had that are Uber only are just getting started/trying it out. The drivers I've talked to that just do it for a little extra cash overwhelmingly prefer Lyft. Most said it is because of the better pay but I've also heard more than once that Lyft customer's tend to be more well behaved in the car for whatever reason. To be fair, this is all anecdotal and I usually prefer not making chit-chat but if the driver insist I always ask them their preference since the driver's always have an opinion that is interesting enough for the duration of the ride.
• jfoster 9y ago
  Lyft barely exists outside of the US. Uber is still on top if you take a global view.
  • rorykoehler 9y ago
    Lyft have a deal with Grab here in Southeast Asia. As I understand I can use Grab to book Lyfts in areas where Lyft operates and Grab doesn't (and vice versa).
    • brianshaler 9y ago
      Not (always) vice versa. In Ho Chi Minh, where Grab operates, I was not able to book using Lyft and had to install/setup Grab.
    • helloindia 9y ago
      As a guy from India, what is Grab?
      • rak111esh 9y ago
        Ola from South East Asia
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      • shubhamaggarwal 9y ago
        http://lmgtfy.com/?q=grab http://lmgtfy.com/?q=grab
    • eigenvector 9y ago
      OK, but that is more of a convenience for American tourists who may not have a local phone number to sign up for Grab than an actual service. People that live outside the US are not going to have the Lyft app in the first place.
    • jfoster 9y ago
      Not anymore. http://mashable.com/2017/03/22/didi-chuxing-lyft-roaming-deal/ http://mashable.com/2017/03/22/didi-chuxing-lyft-roaming-dea...
• paul7986 9y ago
  My friend was driving for Uber, but now exclusively drives for Lyft here in the Mid-Atlantic region. Lyft is giving those great incentives that Uber use to and he is making the same decent to good money he used to with Uber, but driving less.
• Bahamut 9y ago
  I find that Lyft has more consistent service availability than Uber in the Bay Area. If I have to take an early morning ride to the airport, I have had near 100% failure rate with Uber (maybe 1 or 2 times Uber has worked for me in that situation), and 100% success rate with Lyft.
• nullnilvoid 9y ago
  I have not taken Uber for a long time. Lyft is my first choice even if it takes a little longer and costs more. I really hope Lyft can catch up in terms of market share in the US.
• nodesocket 9y ago
  I'd say this assessment is clouded by your own judgements of Uber. Uber is vastly larger than Lyft. I've taken Uber's all over the world (Europe, South America), Lyft barely has market penetration in rural areas of the United States. I recently bet my friend who is supremely confident that United Airlines business will be significantly impacted due to the passenger incident. Thus far, it appears United is doing just fine[1], in fact they may be on pace for a blowout Q2 quarter. Money in the bank. Moral of the story... These types of negative incidents (In my opinion I call it the constant outrage complex) rarely affects finance fundamentals of solid businesses. If you want to take a moral stand against Uber you are absolutely entitled to that and that is fine with me. [1] https://www.thestreet.com/story/14125827/1/united-reports-7-4-increase-in-revenue-passenger-miles-in-april.html https://www.thestreet.com/story/14125827/1/united-reports-7-...
  • praptak 9y ago
    Such incidents set the climate for the debate that is perhaps relatively unimportant for United but critical for Uber: regulation.
  • CPLX 9y ago
    But the finance fundamentals of Uber are truly horrible. Their only explanation for literally lighting billions of dollars in funds on fire to subsidize rides is supposedly to consolidate market share. If they don't have a defensible position and they lose money on every transaction what exactly do they have to show for it?
    • reallydontask 9y ago
      I guess Uber loses money on each sale but makes it up on volume? :)
    • nodesocket 9y ago
      Sure Uber is losing gobs of money, but that's not the most important metric at this stage for them. Look at Tesla, they lost 330 million in 2017 Q1. You absolutely will find bears against Tesla, but that's mainly because of its current $324 share price, not its fundamental business which is losing money.
• rjuyal 9y ago
  I live in Seattle and I just don't prefer Lyft. 100% of the time Lyft's estimated time of arrival is wrong. They say your "lyft" is reaching in 3 minutes when I can clearly see it can't come even in 10mins. On the other hand Uber gives pretty good estimation. Same goes with estimated cost of the ride. Uber tell me exactly how much I will have to pay while Lyft says $7-$12.
  • lobster_johnson 9y ago
    Uber has started allowing drivers to accept a new ride before they're done with the current one, as an incentive to keep driving (as opposed to ending their shift). I have had rides stuck in "Driver is finishing up a trip nearby" for 10 minutes or more. And I could see on the map that there were other available drivers around. I don't remember what the initial estimate is in those cases, but I think it's less than what it ends up being.
    • grkhetan 9y ago
      Its a neat feature actually. Taking up the next ride before finishing a previous one allows drivers to have no downtime, and thus increase their earnings; and for riders it allows them to get drivers sooner in cases where other available drivers are further away.
      • lobster_johnson 9y ago
        Neat for the driver, but for me, I cringe whenever I get that message, because I know I'll have to wait longer than usual. Those rides are always the slowest ones to arrive.
• searchhn 9y ago
  Yes.. as a bay area resident can confirm this. I switched totally to Lyft the past few weeks and have no issues finding a ride promptly. Also all drivers that I met seem to be driving only for Lyft. PS: What convinced me to totally switch was this https://github.com/lyft/envoy https://github.com/lyft/envoy, my way of saying thanks for the Lyft team.
  • nodesocket 9y ago
    This is bay area bubble mentality (I live downtown SF). Does not represent the vast majority of Uber's business and market.
    • amyjess 9y ago
      I've observed a growth in Lyft drivers in Dallas, too. When I first started using Lyft in 2014, there were many times when attempting to request a ride would return an error saying there are no nearby drivers, especially during rush hour (trying to get a ride at 8am was simply a no-go), and it wasn't uncommon for the nearest driver to be 20+ minutes away at various times of day. I actually heard a lot of drivers complain to me about how Lyft sends them pings from people ridiculously far away and saying that it would be better for all involved if Lyft didn't try to match people that far away and just returned an error instead. Now? Neither of those situations have happened in recent memory. I can't remember the last time I got the "no drivers available" error, and at the absolute worst, I might get a driver 15 minutes away in the height of rush hour. Edit: Forgot one more thing. I used to see drivers who had two phones for both Uber and Lyft all the time. Nowadays I don't see anyone doing that anymore.
  • exadeci 9y ago
    Uber is present in 581 cities and 81 countries. Lyft is present in 300 cities in America. Having IT people in SF using Lyft instead of Uber is only a tiny change.
  • grkhetan 9y ago
    I think Uber has released tons more open source sw than Lyft. https://github.com/uber https://github.com/uber
• cool_shit 9y ago
  I just had a really bad experience with Uber myself. Here's my data point: I was just trying to get an Uber the other day in a large city and I waited over an hour in the rain. The first N-1 drivers that accepted my request cancelled on me after 5 minutes. Eventually, a driver picked me up. He didn't want to pick me up where I was, and had a very hard time communicating to me where he was. After some back and forth walks-100-ft-"Do you see me now?"-repeat for about 10 minutes, he asked me to just cancel the request. I said no. I wasn't going to risk paying a fee to cancel. I was already waiting in the rain for an hour. Eventually the driver found me and took me to my location. The whole ride was quiet until the driver decided to break the silence with full-volume anti-slavery rhetoric on the radio. That day I learned that Uber's algorithms, whatever they are, led to at least a single very bad experience. I didn't downvote the driver. Instead, I just didn't rate him. That said, I'd say 95% of my Uber experiences were very good.
  • BugsJustFindMe 9y ago
    > The whole ride was quiet until the driver decided to break the silence with full-volume anti-slavery rhetoric on the radio. You prefer pro-slavery rhetoric on the radio?
• jonthepirate 9y ago
  I wonder if when Uber finally craters if it will take the SF real estate market with it.
• grkhetan 9y ago
  I use Uber a lot, and most of the drivers don't use Lyft. So I am not sure whether one can use any anecdotal evidence like this to gauge anything. One more thing -- even though the press is hitting on Uber with lot of negative articles -- lot of this appears to be because those articles sell. Lot of the negativity seems exaggerated or seems to be the result of incomplete facts provided (for example, Mike Isaac on NYT said Uber uses Slice Intelligence to get aggregate anonymous data on market conditions; he did not mention that Lyft also does the same and that most companies have competitive intelligence teams. There are many other examples like this). I like Uber that they went ahead and got cities to recognize the need for ride-sharing -- they were the first so they had to fight the regulations and entrenched taxi industry. In the end, that benefitted everyone - riders getting convenient, inexpensive rides, and drivers getting livelihood. Uber's competitors also benefited as the market was created by Uber already.
• samfisher83 9y ago
  Its largely a commodity product like oil, transport etc. They are mostly the same drivers. If Uber is doing the same thing cheaper a majority of people are going to use whatever service is cheaper. The fact that uber is giving you certainty on price also helps.
• mathattack 9y ago
  My weak anecdotal data is that both have suffered lately. I had a 20 minute projected wait on both services for a ride in a major city recently. This has to happened to me in years.
• asafira 9y ago
  I'm surprised this is so up-voted, but I guess it's the general opinion here at hackernews. Is there any real data out there on this? Talking to 10 drivers in one region of the US seems like a far cry from the kind of information you want to have to form an opinion on how the tides are shifting. At the end of the day, there are still lots of reasons why Uber might not be slipping away as we think, and I think we would all benefit from at least an effort towards breaking out of our bubbles.