I believe they bin vehicles by available seating and not by things like luggage.

+1 So you may get say a 7 seater where the seats are folded in the trunk, so you can carry 7 people XOR 5 people + light suitcases

There is no option to say “send me a mini van”

There is a newer option that is closer to that - "Uber XXL." (https://www.uber.com/newsroom/airport-travel/)

Agreed. I want van.

...XOR?

So it can carry the 2 extra people, it can carry some luggage, it can't carry both, and it can't carry neither?

^ Pedant detected

I suppose, but I only responded because they went out of their way to say xor, and put it in all caps too.

XOR in common programmer speech is ambiguously used to mean XOR or NAND, so I think their use of XOR was casually correct, while not technically correct.

While NAND is technically correct, it's just not commonly used as a grammatical conjunction.

It is?

I thought it was just used for, like, a couple jokes that you get from “intro to digital logic” class. The joke is funnier if it is correct, I think.

This may be among common programmers who don't deal with any bit twiddling or low-level stuff, but having worked on embedded and also on network stack stuff, it is certainly not the case there. Using the wrong term there will at best confuse your colleagues, at worst result in a logic error in the code, and a potentially nasty one at that depending on how common the low-low case is.

Book a maxi-cab or a dedicated airport transfer service.

I paid extra and scheduled an Uber with a child seat. After waiting 30 minutes, when the car showed up, there was no car seat so the driver canceled right away and drove off. Lesson learned.

It's also impossible to book an Uber with 2 child seats so, i guess i'm effed then.

search "mifold grab and go booster" on amazon

Uber operates in 71 countries. That booster seat is available in 1 country. So it solves 1.4% of the problem.

Also that's a booster seat, not a child care seat, so can't be used if your kids are under 4.

Assuming 71 countries of equal Uber using population.

And assuming that even if you want it you'd be too lazy to cross ship.

That does not look like a legal child seat

I'm pretty sure by now the various "classes" of service offered by Lyft and Uber are instead just ways for the customer to donate money to Lyft and Uber. There's no difference in what kind of yahoo shows up in what kind of beater.

I pretty much just use it to book black cars these days - at least in my local city where those require licensed livery drivers. Good experience there for the most part. Most of the time I’m using Uber it’s either a business expense to the airport or I’m booking for a large party anyways.

That and I guess UberXL - otherwise it’s pretty fungible.

The interesting bit is that black is often pretty much the same price a UberX about a third of the time.

What does "licensed driver" mean? The driver has a valid driving licence?

Assuming OP is in the UK, they're talking about hackney carriages which are subject to more stringent regulation than other private hire vehicles

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackney_carriage

I think this would be similar to the medallions of yellow NYC cabs

It won't be a full-blown Hackney license, Hackney licensing is because unlike these "ride sharing" apps and what the UK would call a "mini cab" service, which require only a "public hire" license - the Hackney license authorises you to literally pick up strangers on the street, which was of course a completely normal way to use a taxi in a major city decades ago and is still somewhat common at say airports. That's what the glowing "Taxi" sign on the roof is for.

This needs more driver quality insight because e.g. passenger gets in your vehicle, you drive them to some secluded spot and their body is found the next morning - there's no records for murder cops to start from, unless there was a witness there may not even be a description of your vehicle. The UK has had this happen, but it's very rare because the sort of person likely to escalate to murder is not going to get licensed.

In contrast a mini-cab or Uber-style driver has records of who was dispatched to pick up somebody, where they were picked up etc. So if you take to murdering your fares the murder detectives will show up at your door with company records implicating you.

It varies a lot by country.

In my experience in west europe, booking a uber XL you usually get a full size van (vw caravelle/multivan, Mercedes v-class or a bigger Renault Trafic) with usually 7 to available seats.

Booking a uberXL in Mexico City gets you a miniSUV with only 4 available seats and if you get too much checked luggage it goes on a roof rack.

Same here. To alter-quote The Simpsons, "My eyes! The classes do nothing!"

Shortly after pandemic, I noticed "corridor fees" on vastly different routes which, mysteriously, bumped-up the price by the same percentage across each route--but only after the ride had completed. The price I was quoted was not remotely close to the price I was charged.

I did the customer service messaging thing. The first time, they removed it. The second and third time, they declined to remove it.

I now "decline" riding Uber unless there's no other option.

As much as I love to hate on Uber and Lyft, tacked on fees like this are often due to state / federal government, and the rideshare service hands are tied. Uber tags on a very long list of random fees when I Uber out of SFO, but when I investigated them, they were all random taxes from the city / state.

If they want to jack up the prices they can just increase them - they don't need to add random fees.

SFO is not really municipal. It's a private commercial property.

If we don't like we can choose a competitor /s

The main problem here is that the stated and billed sums were much different.

Sure the state and Uber can add whatever fee they like. But not after I accept the ride.

Not knowing what you'll pay for something until the moment you actually pay is considered normal only in the US.

Where I am, Uber shows a price, I pay that price. Whatever fees are included is not my problem.

My core concern was the amount charged differed greatly than the amount quoted by not by any intra-route traffic or temporary circumstance, and it was the same percentage across all three rides. This also occurred in 3 different parts of the U.S. during the same few months.

Additionally, these municipal fees are fixed so if that were the case, Uber would know about them in advance, be label them as such, and/or fold them into the quoted price.

Uber seems wilfully deceptive in so many ways. The initial listing of rides including details of vehicles and prices, which looks like an actual offer, but the app then goes off to try and find something similar. Try being a shop, selling someone an item and then going out back to rummage around and see if you actually have anything like what you sold. And then the 'fixed price' you agreed on gets arbitrarily changed on half the trips if traffic gets worse or the driver takes a different route. If I book a trip from the airport, the airport's charge for rideshare lane usage isn't an "unanticipated expense". It's just skeezy.