I'm a big fan of Uber, but the secret to dealing with cabbies is to be firm and obstinate. Like any street business, they're going to take advantage when they smell weakness and fold when they sense strength. Credit card machine doesn't work? Okay, here's the address where you can send me the bill. Don't try to stop me from leaving the cab, it'll be a big mistake involving police and you getting arrested for false imprisonment. Another thing I've done to much success is negotiate the fare to the destination up front, which prevents problems at the other end. Always remember that possession is nine-tenths of the law and that as long as you're in possession of the money, you're in the position of power. And when you act as such, you'll get more respect from the cabbies to begin with.

Or I could just use Uber :)

That all sounds very unpleasant. I'd rather work with professionals.

Given that I easily rode in a hundred taxis all over Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline, and Chestnut Hill, it would be extremely statistically unlikely that I just happened to get only the far above average good experiences each time.

The anecdote I described also matches the general experiences of all my friends and family as well, with occasional outliers (both good and bad), so I feel very confident in saying that an average case taxi ride anywhere in the Boston area involves a clean, modern taxi, polite driver, properly functioning credit card machine, a short wait (and no wait at all if you call the dispatcher ahead).

Yes, of course there is variance and sometimes people will have a worse experience. Those worse experiences are very rare, and the taxi services overall are very good the vast majority of the time.

Clean, modern taxi, polite driver? In Boston, MA? You must be kidding, sir.

Before Uber, every cab I took was smelly, the cars were late 1970s models, sour drivers, etc.

Cabs have gotten a lot better, thanks to Uber.

No, I wasn't kidding. My cab experiences in Boston, going back to 2008, well before any Uber competition can apply, have always been good -- perfectly normal with no serious complaints. I'm not saying the cab drivers poured me a glass of champagne or something, just that they had clean, newer cars with functioning card readers, they were on time, and I didn't stand in very long lines except a few times at the airport.

It is very telling that when a person describes his taxis experiences in a super boring, uncontroversial and simple manner: i.e. that the taxis are just normal cars with credit card readers and you should expect a perfectly normal experience if you get in one -- then everyone here acts like I'm giving some kind of gushing, outrageous praise to taxis, and acts indignant that I don't describe taxis as basically the car Fred Flintstone drove but with killer bees inside.

It's crazy that people are so adamant to do social engineering for Uber that they won't even agree to entirely uncontroversial claims, like most taxis in Boston are clean or have functioning card readers -- things which are indisputably accurate.

I'm not saying you should dislike Uber. I'm not saying you should ride in a taxi. I'm not saying the taxi services are perfect. I'm not saying there are zero bad taxi experiences.

I'm only saying that most taxi experiences in Boston are perfectly uneventful, normal rides that completely meet the expectation of the riders, and don't suffer from the hyperbolic criticisms here.

>It's crazy that people are so adamant to do social engineering for Uber that they won't even agree to entirely uncontroversial claims, like most taxis in Boston are clean or have functioning card readers -- things which are indisputably accurate.

I'm from Boston. I took a ride from Brighton to Hynes. The cab driver goes through Storrow Dr and he skips the Kenmore exit to get to Hynes. I think he's going to take the Beacon Hill exit and he skips that too.

I asked him why he didn't take the exit and he said, "Oh I thought you wanted to go to the Prudential."

Prudential is the same place as Hynes. The taxi takes me all the way up Storrow to I-93 then to I-90 west finally taking the Copley exit back to Hynes.

My bill ended up $45 from Brighton to Hynes.

I have countless horror stories of cabs not picking me up because the distance was too short (South end to Fenway is too short), credit card machines "not working" so it's cash only, cabs not showing up at all or extremely late.

I even have a cab scam story in Baltimore which I commented about here on HN.

Uber has questionable ethics, but at least I don't have to deal with frustrations.

I've lived in New Englad over a decade so this is my anecdotal experience with Boston cab drivers.

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one. It's the first I've ever heard of a satisfied taxi customer in Boston but I'm glad to hear there's at least one!

It's not just me though. Dozens of friends, family members, classmates, and coworkers all described the same experiences I've had whenever the topic came up.

The average-case taxi ride in Boston is quite good.

Dozens of friends, family members, classmates, and coworkers of mine (not to mention the majority of users in this thread) have described the same experiences I've had as well. Guess we'll call it a wash?

No, we won't call it a wash because it's only people like those in this thread, who gravitate towards contrarian arguments every single time something about Uber comes up, who are saying such egregious and hyperbolic false criticisms of taxis.

Dozens of your connections did not say that 80% of the time the card reader is broken, or that they have never traveled in a single clean taxi ever in their lives. These are patently ridiculous ideas being passed off as if they are in some way accurate portrayals of taxi services when they are just cartoonish fictions meant to inflame and cast Uber in an unrealistically positive light.

As I've said repeatedly, none of what I am saying is in any way a criticism of Uber, nor is it a suggestion that anyone should not use Uber if they want to.

All I am saying is that taxi rides are overwhelmingly normal and most everyone already knows this and accepts it and happily uses taxis plenty of the time, even if they also use Uber too.

The people here are trying to make it seem like I'm saying that taxis are made out of gold and you get a free Swedish massage while you ride. Hardly! I'm claiming that most credit card readers are functional and most taxis are fairly modern and clean -- these are not controversial, and to disagree with them is solely a symptom of unrealistic bias, and in this thread anyway seemingly also irrational hatred, towards the taxi business.

So, I was going to just let this one go, I really was. But, you should know that stating opinion as if it were fact with regard to one's truthfulness, a la "Dozens of your connections did not say that..." is an incredibly rude thing to say.

You have no earthly idea who I am, who my friends are, and most certainly are not privy to the conversations we've had. While this may be painful to hear, you are not the sole bastion of truth when it comes to taxi experiences. I can not say, for certain, whether you are telling the truth when you say you've had these conversations with your friends and family. To suggest that you're lying about this is absurd though - and I won't do it - because I don't know you, or your friends, and am certainly not privy to any conversations you've had on the matter either. I believe you when you say this.

Do not discount others viewpoints and pretend that you have a priori knowledge on a subject. It diminishes you.

The experience of 80% of credit card readers being defective is so statistically anomalous that the only reasonable thing to do if someone claims it is to disbelieve them. Unless they have hard evidence, you are perfectly justified to say, you know what, that's just too absurdly far-fetched to give it credit. Same thing if someone says literally zero taxis they have ever used have been in clean condition. That's a many-standard-deviations-from-the-mean event and I don't believe it. The more likely hypothesis is that you're being hyperbolic out of frustration with my other points.

It may indeed be rude for me to directly point it out, but given the way others are treating me in the thread, I won't lose any sleep over it. I don't think I'm making cutting remarks, only remarks that are consistent with basic, universal experiences, not just of me, but everywhere.

Others seem to seek to take these basic, universal experiences and try to claim they aren't universal, and that instead their experiences of crazy statistical outlier events (e.g. zero clean taxis ever) somehow are the common and universal experiences, and that I am being presumptuous or rude for disbelieving that they actually experienced some exceedingly rare event that shouldn't be believed.

It's completely unreasonable to believe that saying 80% of card readers are broken and there are zero clean taxis deserves to be compared in the same breath as a claim like almost every time I rode in a taxi it was just a normal functioning car and nothing stood out as functionally broken or meaningfully substandard in quality.

The two things are not the same kind of claim, even categorically, no matter how much people in the thread don't like it.

"I'm trying to say that the connections whose informal opinions you cite as backup couldn't possibly have said something as extreme as what the other people of this thread are saying."

The mental gymnastics required to follow your train of thought are just astounding. You're argument here seems to be that the opinions of my friends and family can't possibly match with what other people, not even myself have said in a completely different part of this thread. I mean, I guess I agree? What a truly bizarre statement.

"I'm not sure how to explain it."

On this point, we are in complete agreement.

You cited the opinions of connections to backup your general feeling that taxi service is bad.

Is it your opinion, or the consensus opinion of your connections, that 80% of the time the card reader is broken, or that the percentage of taxis which are clean is near 0 (or some other claim similar to these)?

If you're not making claims of that extremity, then whatever you are talking about isn't very related to what anyone else here has said, and depending on the specifics, I may even agree with you, but it wouldn't be relevant to a thread where the primary claim that started the disussion is that taxi service is overwhelmingly always unbelievably bad.

If you are making claims of that extremity, then I don't believe them, and feel that disbelieving them is simply a matter of the claims being too much of an outlier to deserve any serious plausibility.

Can you please point out exactly where I said that 80% of card readers are broken? You keep stating this figure as coming from my mouth and are using it as an avenue to call me a liar.

Please, go ahead, show me.

I did not claim that you said it, not at all, and that's a definite misrepresentation of what I'm talking about.

The comment in which it was said is here: < https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12191938 >.

I am comparing whatever anecdotes (yours and others) that are supposedly backed up by lots of people you know, with this.

While the people you know might have had some bad experiences sometimes, I wouldn't believe they were anywhere near the claims going on in this thread.

If your connections reported occasional bad experiences with taxis, who would care? It couldn't possibly be relevant to a thread where the entire context of the thread is that people are saying that all Boston taxis are almost always awful and almost always have broken card readers, etc.

I'm not sure how to explain it. I'm trying to say that the connections whose informal opinions you cite as backup couldn't possibly have said something as extreme as what the other people of this thread are saying -- in which case whatever minor and totally expected occasional complaints your sources have had, they aren't relevant.

Well, I still do believe you, because I don't make it a habit of calling a person a liar with no verifiable proof to the contrary.

Good luck with everything.

Just as a total aside, sometimes the 'reply' link doesn't appear beneath a comment, especially if it is new. If you click on the permalink for that comment (the time next to the commenter's username), it will take you to a page for just that comment, and will have a box for replying.

I only mention it because I believe you are replying to comments below, but by making replies to an earlier comment instead of the actual comment you are replying to -- and sometimes this is why.

I've definitely done that before, and thought perhaps it was a reply limit from HN or something (which can happen).

> I don't make it a habit of calling a person a liar with no verifiable proof to the contrary.

This is an unfair mischaracterization of what I've said.

If someone makes an extraordinary claim and has no evidence, you probably shouldn't just believe it. Choosing not to believe it based on a reasonable statistical premise (e.g. the failure rate of card readers is not high enough such that 80% of them are always broken) is perfectly valid, and is not impolite or rude. It's not at all the same thing as "calling them a liar." The burden of proof is on the party making extraordinary claims.

First off, I actually appreciate that - I always just assumed it was a nesting limit!

That aside, honest question, because I truly don't understand. You've said things like "I never once experienced a broken credit card machine" and "they were always early and helped me with my bags". I find these claims equally as fantastic as the claims that you seem to disregard from others (not myself) re: this 80% figure. I honestly, truly do not believe that every cab you ever called in 8 years was early. Moreso, I find it very difficult to believe that you believe that this is normal.

So, all this being said, why is it that you feel that your stance on that end of the spectrum is right, and others are wrong. Where is your evidence (not anecdotal), for passing the burden of proof for the extraordinary claims you're making?

Well the failure rate of the machines is super low, so experiencing nearly zero broken card machines would be about expected. The outcome of never experiencing a broken one certainly is rare, as you say, but it's nowhere near the astronomical claim made elsewhere of an 80% failure rate.

I'm not asking anyone to believe that zero card readers are broken. I'm only saying I never experienced a broken one, and never experiencing a broken one isn't that weird because the failure rate is low.

Someone saying that 80% of the time the reader is broken is making an extremely different type of claim, not really even comparable with my analogous claim of not ever experiencing a broken one. While my experience might also differ from average, it is orders of magnitude closer to average than someone happening to experience a broken one 80% of the time.

I'm not sure what to say about the bags comment. Every time I've ever gotten a cab to or from any airport anywhere, from Boston to Hong Kong, the driver helped me with bags if I had them. And all the other drivers helped all the other people in line too.

Maybe you're referring to the fact that I always experienced them coming early -- yes this could be highly variable. My anecdotes are probably no more valuable than others here on that point, mostly because nobody here extended the outrageously extreme claims they made (80% card reader failure, effectively zero clean taxis ever) into the topic of how late taxis are, though they might have (e.g. someone possibly saying another statistically unbelievable thing like 'taxis are always 30 minutes late' or '90% of the time they don't even show up' or something).

Keep in mind that being early only applied to taxis I scheduled from home to the airport. I never called ahead to arrange a taxi except when going to the airport, so those are the only ones which could have possibly been early or late.

The majority of cabs I ever took were cabs I just hailed on the street or at a taxi stand.