Reality check, this dude had taken a plane and needed transport around his destination - this is very much how people live when on a trip. This is perfectly normal behavior in most of the world, especially when it's a trip for business purposes. The only change is that the price of travel varies extremely between countries.

Reality check triple :)

It depends a lot on where one's from, and/or what one's used to. I can only speak for Europe and larger cities in Eastern Asia: A rail connect from airport to downtown is commonplace, often high-speed, and is taken by the vast majority of passengers that do not have a private or hotel pick-up, including business travelers.

A fare of $100 to 'get across town', unless I was in a real hurry to make up 20 minutes of time for a really important point-to-point connection, would horrifies me, but occasionally the bullet has to be bit.

[For smaller cities without rail infrastructure, taxi/cab fares tend correspond to a lot less.]

No, I can safely say there are billions (with a b) of people in this world who could never afford to take a $100 car ride across town and back.

If you think this is normal, you are in an elite group and only use people in your group to compare to. Even if there are a million people in that group, it is still elite.

Of the roughly 750 million people who caught a plane in the US in the 12 months to April 2014[1], many of them will have paid a driver to get them to and from the airport.

Arguing that they shouldn't complain about crappy service or being harassed by authorities, because billions of others can't even afford a taxi is a pretty bad argument.

Person A: "We should be demanding that our authorities look more closely at the quality of water in our town. Having it contain high amounts of flammable gasses is not ok."

Person B: "But there's billions of people in the world who don't even have clean drinking water"

It doesn't invalidate person A's argument - yes, there's lots of people without drinking water or without the $100 to spend on two taxis. Yes, we need to do something about it.

We don't, however, need to completely disregard everything else until that problem is fixed. We're capable, as a society, of dealing with multiple issues concurrently.

[1] = http://apps.bts.gov/xml/air_traffic/src/index.xml

And these billions of people are all living in the states and flying into Colorado?

As an American, I thought American taxis were expensive until I visited Europe some....wow, or even japan. It's all about the perspective.

Chinese farmers are in an elite group compared to African or even Vietnamese farmers...so what is your point?

What is the purpose of this line of argument?

"Most people in the world can't afford taxi rides like this so don't complain about how the police treat it"?

there are 330 million people in the US for whom these rates are perfectly normal. if you want to call us an elite group, those are your words. if you want us to apologize for having an advanced economy, you might be waiting a while.

and the irony is that Uber's main business model is making these rates cheaper!

(I've been to Denver once - I took a shuttle bus from the airport to my hotel on Colfax (took long way around and was not that cheap) and the public bus back to the terminal which left from the central bus station, was cheap and direct.)

There should be a name for this ridiculous argument, so we can just name it and dismiss it.

There are also billions of people that will never fly.

One possibly useful data point is this is Denver Colorado and the "local" airport for Denver can be a good 30-40 mile drive depending on where your Denver side destination is located. Its entirely possible he's only paying $1/mile or so which isn't all that bad for door to door service. Or put another way the driver is only grossing in revenue maybe $30/hour and has expenses and probably doesn't earn revenue 8 hours per day anyway.

On a semi-regular basis I used to take the train to Chicago and the train station is across the street from the corporate office in the formerly named sears tower. Also historically I've taken the train to the NYC Hope conference which is also across the street from the NYC train station. Air travel isn't as convenient as taking the train or a bus...

Unless your train stations are out further than your airports with poorer transport connections into the city. So is life in china.

This.

Trains are faster than planes for short-ish inter-city journeys in many other places because (i) you can use public transport to get to the stations, (ii) you avoid the time spent on check-in and security check and (iii) trains are more frequent than planes to the same destination.

None of these is the case in Beijing. I don't know about other cities. I've taken inter-city trains from Beijing a few times. Each time, I've found the experience of getting to the station, and finding the right spot, more arduous than for international flights.

Ha, train stations, that's rich. So is life in the US.

Portland to Seattle via train is quite reasonable. The stations are both downtown.

Same with Boston to NYC, or the Northeast coast in general.

I guess most larger companies pay their employees taxi trips to/from the airport.

I would expect that every company pays their employees' business travel costs. (With some "ordinary and reasonable" caveats, of course.)

Why would an employee pay out of pocket for something that's for the employer's convenience/at the employer's discretion and direction?

Some companies don't pay _taxi_ travel costs if there is a cheaper alternative (e.g. shuttle busses)

Good point. I try to take public transport on business (and personal) trips whenever that's reasonable (which is subset of those times when it's cheaper).

In many foreign countries, the taxi is so much easier than trying to figure out public transport that the taxi wins. In many US cities, public transport doesn't get you close enough to be reasonable alternative, even though it would be less money out of pocket.