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A comment on Why you have (probably) already bought your last car. Parent comment

Re:Why you have (probably) already bought your last car by vidarh on Thursday October 11, 2018 @10:20PM (#18198636)
As someone who lives without a car: you don't really need to be able to just start one. The big differentiator in my experience is whether or not the wait is consistent.

I will ditch a cab company if the waits become too variable, but will happily accept a few minutes longer wait, as it's not really a matter of whether it's 3 minutes or 5 or 10, but knowing that I need to think about it at least that much in advance. If I regularly go to book one 3 minutes in advance and 25% of the time it turns out to take 8, that's more annoying that if it's consistently a 10 minute wait.

As long as it's consistent, it becomes habit very quickly to order at the right time in advance.

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Re:Why you have (probably) already bought your last car by craftyguy on Thursday October 11, 2018 @10:46PM (#18198753)
That's also a great way to sum up the problem with many forms of public transportation in the US too. The light rail and buses near my home are reliably unreliable, sometimes they are right on schedule, sometimes they arrives 10-15 minutes after schedule, and sometimes they arrives somewhere in between.
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