Does your girlfriend give those drivers 1 star reviews?

For what it's worth, my girlfriend has taken an uber in NYC 100+ times, and has never complained about any kind of harassment from an Uber driver. She's complained to me about sidewalk/subway harassment, and workplace harassment, so I don't think there is a reason she would hide Uber harassment from me.

Also: Regular car services were horrible pre-Uber...which is why Uber took over NYC car transit.

It was basically: Call up a number, get answered by a guy with a heavy accent on a low quality landline, tell him what you want, and hope and pray that he understood what you said and the car shows up. If it doesn't, call another company and repeat.

There may be some miscommunication here. There are the 555-DRYV car services that are precisely what you described, and then there are the private car services that you routinely see lining up on Park Ave. to collect the glut of lawyers that had to stay past 8pm. The latter are fantastic.

There are hundreds of car services in New York City. Most New Yorkers have one or two they have learned work well for their neighborhood and provide good service and stick with those. Car services are no different than any other consumer service, there are a good ones and bad ones. Also why does it matter if they have a "thick accent"? You are suggesting that the communication is so poor that people regularly need to hang up and call another car service? This is simply hot true. There are times when you might need to call another service because they might be backed up but certainly not due to of a total communication failure.

Can't rate a driver who didn't start a trip. That's how they fly under the radar. Forcing the driver to be the one who cancels will get them on the radar and out of the system. Excessive cancel rates get drivers deactivated more than anything.

Drivers harass a woman by not accepting a trip?

>which we all protested and complained about, but nothing came of it.

Just curious to what extent you protested?

I have to call you out on this. Most drivers have both apps installed in their phone and their behavior does not change because they got hailed through Uber.

It seems I run into far less assholes driving for Lyft, though. Maybe their QC is better?

EDIT:

I mean, they can start out driving for both, but if you get fired by Lyft, you can't ever come back in most cases.

I had a terrible experience with a Lyft driver. I took a Lyft home after a long flight where I wasn't feeling well. I mentioned something about not feeling well. The driver decided I was going to die and mess up his car. Then, he tried to dump me at McDonalds. Only after arguing with him for 10 minutes in the McDonalds parking lot and refusing to get out of the car, he reluctantly sorta agreed to take me to the hospital except he took me to the children's hospital.

I took a Lyft in Las Vegas where the driver was clearly mentally unstable (sounded and acted it), let us out at the wrong place in an unfamiliar neighborhood in a windstorm, and got out to piss in full view of both his headlights and the front of the wrong house. He then had to drive us to the right place grumbling the whole way. I've not ever had any ride/customer experience that even compares in confusion and intensity of uneasiness in an Uber, despite their shitty engineering work culture.

Lyft doesn't seem to do any form of real background checks. I had a driver that very clearly shouldn't have had a license and didn't speak a single word of English. The dude straight up blew through two reds.

how can her experience with lyft be any better? most times the drives are using both services...

As I understand it, the Lyft vetting is more intense than Uber's. So many Lyft drivers can be Uber drivers, but the reverse may not be true. I could be wrong though, my only data points are talking with drivers and therefore anecdotal or hearsay.

I doubt it. My Lyft onboarding experience consisted of watching a couple of safety videos at an auto parts store instead of a 1:1 "mentor" session. Last I heard, mentors are gone in San Francisco.

Lyft requires newer cars, which could bar totally broke drivers.

I have perfect background check, of course.

Lyft is definitely hands-on when reacting to passenger complaints. They likely have sentiment analysis software for comments by passengers.

Lyft passengers are ruthless in ratings. It took me a while to recover from initial ratings while I was learning. At least your ratings are a rolling average of last 100 rides so you can fix the problem of bad ratings with new rides. Last week should help: got 17 5-Star ratings and no negatives.