> Meanwhile, with Uber you just press a button and they take you to the airport, bags and all.

Not necessarily. Ubers don't want to go to the airport for the same reason that cabs don't. I've had ride shares cancel on me once the driver's gotten close enough to see that the destination is an airport. Granted it doesn't happen as often as with cabs whose meter is conveniently not working once you mention the airport, but it does still happen.

Illegal parking in bike lanes is a huge problem though. This morning there were several vehicles parked in the bike lane across two consecutive blocks, so I had to ride in the travel lane the whole while. Some asshole unsafely passed me at speed by going into the bike lane, then swerving back into the travel lane at the next parked vehicle, then we got into a yelling match at the next light about when cyclists are allowed to depart the bike lane (hint: you don't have to use it when you're literally unable to because it's blocked).

Enforcement is an absolute joke, and sometimes it's even cop cars that are blocking bike lanes. Bike lanes that aren't physically protected from people parking in them are oftentimes not worth anything, and unfortunately, we don't have any cross-town bike lanes in Manhattan! (They're on the verge of opening the first one, but it's well out of the way of my commute.)

If the drivers do that, report them through the app. They’ll stop doing it pretty quickly—if it’s done often enough, they’re “fired”

I tried to go from SFO to South Bay a while back around midnight and eventually took a cab after being cancelled by multiple Uber drivers. Some even called me, asked where I was going, then angrily said they don't go to South Bay and cancelled.

Heh, I've always had the opposite experience. They either want to go to the city or somewhere far South. Something close like Millbrae, South City or Burlingame? They cancel the ride.

I believe all of these stories; I just don't understand why people expect or believe taxi drivers and Uber drivers are fundamentally different people with different incentives.

Uber drivers get kicked off Uber if they do it too often. They might have the same incentives but the platform at least helps prevent it.

The frustrating part about Uber is that I have to wait 10 minutes for each one before they refuse to take me somewhere. With a taxi I can just walk down the row of taxis at the airport. On the other hand, the only reason taxis can get that benefit is because they lobby so hard to kick the Ubers out to a parking lot 10 minutes away.

"I've had ride shares cancel on me once the driver's gotten close enough to see that the destination is an airport."

I'm not understanding this. If you're using the app correctly then the driver knows the destination before they even accept the ride. If you're setting an address near an airport in an attempt to be duplicitous I would be equally discouraged as a driver.

Happens all. the. time.

I'm in NYC, and I use taxis 99% of the time because of this phenomenon: Uber/Lyft drivers rapidly accept your ride, then cancel (or slow-play the pickup, so that you cancel, to protect their driver rating) as soon as they see it's a place they don't want to go.

It's so bad here that I just won't deal with Lyft and Uber unless they're throwing serious discounts my way, and I have time to burn.

The worst part is how much of your time it wastes. With a cab, whatever, another one is coming soon. But with rideshares, you could be waiting awhile on someone who'll cancel on you, thus wasting a lot more time. Even if twice as many taxis refuse to go there as rideshares, I'm still wasting more time on the rideshares, so it's worse.

> With a cab, whatever, another one is coming soon.

That really depends on your neighborhood. In the outer burroughs, you can walk some ways before you reach a busy enough street to find cabs.

If you have bags, small children, or are disabled, that walk is basically a non-starter.

Fair enough. I've been taking Ubers to JFK for years and have never had this happen - but I guess everyone has their own experiences.

Airport trips are relatively easy, as long as you're in normal operating hours. Drivers don't want to go places where it's hard to get a return trip. JFK has plenty of passengers both ways.

This does not seem to jive with the parent comment to whom I was originally replying though:

"Ubers don't want to go to the airport for the same reason that cabs don't."

Seems consistent to me: Ubers don't want to places where they can't easily pick up a return trip; same as cabs. That's always been my assumption, anyway.

This is a result of poor logistics on the part of Uber and Lyft. There are a large number of Ubers and lyfts that will drop off and have to leave the airport without a passenger, meanwhile, you can call you car and be told it's a 10min wait as someone who isn't even on premises accepts the fare.

Are they actually allowed to do that, or is there a regulation preventing it?

Sorry, I'm confused now. You stated above that JFK has passengers going both ways - so isn't this exactly the kind of fare an Uber would want to take on?

Where are you taking them from?

Midtown, the village, Brooklyn, Queens... Where are you taking them from?

I've been taking Ubers from and to JFK, EWR, and LGA from Williamsburg and Chinatown for years never had a cancel on any of them.

I thought the driver couldn't see the destination until they started the ride after you get in. Although I've encountered drivers starting a ride as soon as they see me on the street (which I contested and got money back for).

Seeing your luggage etc means they can make a pretty good guess about whether you're going to the airport.

>or slow-play the pickup, so that you cancel, to protect their driver rating

Yep, or they even just call you and ask you to cancel.

My understanding is that with Lyft, the driver does not see the destination until they've reached (or come close to) your location.

And yes, I'm using the app correctly -- not sure why you're jumping to some conclusion that I must be being duplicitous. There's no convenient "nearby" drop-off points near airports here anyway.

I've never used Lyft so couldn't comment there. And you're jumping to a conclusion assuming I was jumping to a conclusion. I was just trying to make sense of how that could happen as you described.

As a social tip: If you accuse someone of potentially being duplicitous, you shouldn't be surprised when they don't react positively to it. And if you don't know a lot about something, your first guess shouldn't be that the person you're talking to must be lying about something.

You seem very sensitive about this, so once again I'll just mea culpa and say I never stood up and yelled j'accuse - your description of the problem just made little sense to me and I was trying to discuss how it might be possible.

Agree with all of this except the part about enforcing the traffic laws against cars parked in the bike lanes. The NYPD is most certainly lazy and incompetent (as well as corrupt), but the issue is the bike lanes themselves. Most of the city, especially the most congested parts, simple have no room for a bike lane. The vast majority of vehicles blocking the bike lanes are making pickups or deliveries. There is simply nowhere else for them to pull over (much less park). This fact was ignored by Bloomberg and his friends when they drew bike lanes all over the place on congested roads. It may be a noble goal to have plenty of space for bikers and pedestrians, but that isn't the way New York was designed, and its not feasible as long as the residents and the businesses depend on a steady stream of deliveries, pickups, garbage removal and other assorted vehicles associated with living in a city. Giving tickets to the UPS driver who has to deliver a package at a location is just going to cost him money, not deter him from pulling over - he has no choice.

Here's the thing though. Those bike lanes are clearly being used by lots of people, as are the travel lanes by lots of drivers. What isn't being utilized well is all of that free parking along the street -- most of those vehicles only move twice a week when they have to because of street sweeping.

So the simple solution is to eliminate all of the free parking and replace it with paid parking and loading zones. And raise the price high enough so that there's always spots free close enough to where you're going so that vehicles have a place to park themselves for short periods of time that's outside of the travel and bike lanes.

> So the simple solution is to eliminate all of the free parking and replace it with paid parking and loading zones.

There's free parking in Midtown?

> There is simply nowhere else for them to pull over

Yes there is. We've just zoned it for streetside parking.

Do you live in New York? Have you been to Manhattan? There is very little parking anywhere. In the busiest places there is no street parking at all.

> Have you been to Manhattan?

I live on 26th Street. We have a bike lane, a traffic lane, and two sides of street side parking. This is the case across a large faction of Manhattan, the avenues exempted. For Exhibit A in stupid parking lanes, I present Broadway.

I live and work in Manhattan and there's on-street parking everywhere. Most streets are easily wide enough for two travel lanes plus a bike lane, but instead have one or two rows of parked cars. It's quite common for streets to have two parking lanes, one travel lane, and no bike lanes.

Just pull up satellite imagery on Google Maps and it'll all be obvious.

Are you sure about this? Maybe this is true on avenues, but at least with the new york I know well (grew up in greenwich village), the streets are very narrow (one parking lane and one driving lane is already tricky), with avenues sometimes being wider.

The village, particularly west of 6th Ave, is one of the only parts of Manhattan I can think of where 1 traffic lane and 1 parking lane is the norm. Once you get above 14th St or east of 6th Ave, its pretty much 2 parking lanes, one travel lane, and sometimes a bike lane nestled between the parking and the traffic on the crosstown streets (and on your major crosstown streets like 14th, 23rd, etc... still two lanes of parking, and often two lanes of traffic, but almost never any kind of bike facilities)

I'm also talking about the area around washington square park. The majority of the streets only allow one side of parking at any given time (with opposite side of the street parking for cleaning), where the streets are one way. Should a truck be doing any unloading on these streets, virtually no one can get through (where that is often true in midtown as well on regular streets..

I live and drive here. Parking is virtually non-existent.

http://www.opencurb.nyc/

You see the sea of red lines? Those are all places you cannot park.

I'm seeing a sea of green as much as I am a sea of red. "Parking is virtually non-existent" is so far from the truth I don't even know where to begin with that. You're literally looking at the map and complaining that not every single square foot of Manhattan can be used for parking. Guess what, land in the densest city in the country has better uses than parking cars. And yet in many neighborhoods almost every single block has twice the parking space than it does driving space (go look at East Village on that map). I think you're complaining about Midtown Manhattan, but what alternative solution could you possibly want? It's a simple matter of physics. The space just isn't there. There's no room to add parking; there's not even any room for people to drive or walk on the sidewalk.

The issue we are discussing is bike lanes. My whole point is the space just isn't there, and issuing tickets to trucks making deliveries in the vast areas that don't have parking isn't going to make it any better.

Looks to me like that map indicates about half of one side of all the steeets are ok for parking?

Take another look. Everywhere that is not green means that trucks, garbage trucks, UPS vans, and every other delivery service has to pull over and block a potential bike lane to make a delivery. That would be true even if every green area was open, and nobody else was parked anywhere. There is a reason that parking garages charge what they do in Manhattan, and its not because there is parking available on the street. ITT are people who have clearly never driven in the city, let alone made deliveries.

Most on-street parking isn't paid, so almost everywhere that's green on that map isn't available for delivery services anyway; it's going to be taken by personal vehicles that move twice a week for street-sweeping. Add more on-street parking and you'll just have more people with personal vehicles using it; it won't make it available for deliveries.

The best way to make delivery drop-off points available is to get rid of all the free parking and make it all paid, and keep raising prices on a block-by-block basis until there's typically spots free on any given block. It'll be a minor marginal cost for someone making a delivery to pay, say, $5/30 minutes (this will probably actually be cheaper if it means they can find a nearby spot, thus saving time driving around and time shuttling things from a farther spot). But $5/30 minutes works out to $240/day, which will easily discourage long-term parkers who shouldn't be using the scarce resource of on-street parking in busy areas anyway.

In less busy (i.e. purely residential) areas, it might make sense to move to a permit model, with permits costing several hundred dollars per month. There'd of course be parking meters mixed in with all that for people who are driving to the area and don't have permits.

There is a doable solution, and that would be implementing a system where all major throughways have BRT with proper right of ways (and not the kind where other cars can just enter the bus lane). Yes this will lead to more congested streets for those who choose to drive their own cars, but to remove the current gridlock that exists due to the failing subway, this is the only real solution (where it could also easily be extended well beyond where the subways and existing buses go now.

If you have a substantive point to make, make it.

As someone who doesn’t live in the USA it’s difficult for me to determine if your comment refers to some context I’m unfamiliar with.

Are you implying electric push scooters are a solution for people who live 20 kilometres out of the city but work there?

I’ve never been, but doesn’t it snow in NYC?

>it’s difficult for me to determine if your comment refers to some context I’m unfamiliar with.

The city has only lifted the ban on electric bikes a few months ago[1], but still bans electric scooters[2][3] because screw you, that's why. (They have reasons now, just like they've had reasons for banning e-bikes for over a decade after the technology provided a really viable mode of transportation at a reasonable price point).

That's the context you're missing.

[1]https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/11/why-does-new-...

[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/nyregion/new-york-today-a...

[3]https://www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2018/07/19/nyc-s-do...

The other part of the context is Lime and Bird (scooter rentals), which are expanding like crazy in other cities in the US.

NYC traffic mitigation solutions are generally backwards or working from bad information.

Allowing electric bicycles and push scooters solves the last mile problem for many people.

The argument the city has made is that electric bicycles are too dangerous and will cause injury to pedestrians. This is a bad faith argument, because it's already illegal to cycle on the sidewalk, and if the city actually cared about non driver safety, it would push to enforce bicycle lane safety. It also failed to provide sufficient, to me, evidence that electric bicycles and push scooters pose a threat to pedestrians.

If better transit options existed, including last mile (push scooter) and ~3mile solutions (electric rentable bicycles), perhaps people wouldn't Uber as much.

FYI, responding to the parent comment, I've found out that the e-bikes were kind of unbanned a few months ago[1].

Kind of because you can go 20+mph on a regular bike without pedal assist. It seems like e-bikes are still banned statewide. Eh.

[1]https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/04/new-york-city...