
New Yorkers Can Now Get Unlimited UberPool in Manhattan for $200 - micaeloliveira
http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2016/09/27/unlimited-uber-rides-new-york-100-dollars-subscription-october/#4be2af4b570a
======
ixtli
Before you get all excited about this, it's ONLY UberPOOL and your destination
must start and end in Manhattan. So if you use this to commute for two weeks
you're paying 10 (edit: obviously 100/20 = 5, it's early. leave me alone)
dollars flat for a cab ride that you share and will take longer than normal
because of the overhead of splitting the ride.

There are certainly some people for whom this will be cost effective,
especially if they spend most of their day traveling to places they can be
5-10 minutes +/\- their target arrival. However for people like me who live on
the east side of Manhattan and commute to FiDi it doesn't actually save a
worthwhile amount of money.

Also forbes is incredibly spammy so here's the link directly to the promo:
[https://www.uber.com/info/plus/newyork/](https://www.uber.com/info/plus/newyork/)

~~~
kdamken
Also, uberpool is terrible. Can easily make a 20 minute ride 60 minutes
depending on how many other fares they pick up/drop off on the way.

I took one into the city once to try it out. Normally a 20 minute drive, we
stopped and picked up 2 other fares. They both got dropped off before me
(which is insane), and it ended up taking over an hour.

The worst part? The drive told me that if we dropped off one and another came
up, he'd have to pick that up too before dropping me off.

~~~
bpicolo
Been very good in my experience for going from San Francisco -> East Bay.

~~~
ixtli
I have used uber and lyft in many cities and been satisfied. Never once in
NYC. I probably just have bad luck, but honestly in manhattan it's the same
price to get a cab even at 3am and doesn't require an app or surge pricing.
I've heard the same anecdotes from friends. The notable exception is going to
or from other burrows. It's often cheaper to get a car from a service if
there's no surge, though the green cabs are starting to compete when traveling
from somewhere outside manhattan.

In general transit problems (and thus solutions) don't translate from other
cities to New York or vice versa.

------
whenwillitstop
I live in Manhattan. This is a rip off. The Uber Pool rides can take up to an
hour sometimes, they drop off and pick up up to five people on your way. Uber
if you are reading this, everyone in NYC realizes what a waste of time Uber
Pool is.

~~~
CoolGuySteve
How does Uber Pool even work during rush hour? Do you spend all day trapped in
Times Square waiting to pick up the second person? Or does Uber try and route
around gridlock? Does it just skip the other person if the car gets stuck?

Or maybe I'm paranoid because of a bad experience trying to get to a job
interview via cab my first time in NYC.

~~~
jacques_chester
Uber's wayfinding logic in Manhattan is actively dumb. With billions of
dollars they could just hire a thousand locals to sit in a passenger seat to
give navigation instructions.

If a car is ahead of me on an avenue, even by half a street, it will send them
_around the block_ instead of suggesting I walk forward a bit.

Or, instead of asking me to cross an avenue, it will send the driver down a
different avenue for multiple streets to loop back to my position.

It is _obsessed_ with getting on to the expressways. It will happily crawl
past relatively free-flowing avenues to squeeze into an expressway full of
cars heading to Westchester.

Its estimates of ETA seem to assume that there is no traffic. They are
hilariously bad.

Drivers, who have been burnt by customers getting mad at them for not going to
an exact location or for "ripping them off", follow the map religiously. No
matter what I text or call. They follow an app which was presumably written by
people who've never set foot in this city.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I thought they used google. Anyway, NYers are notorious for having strong
opinions about the 'right way' to navigate any given route. Grain of salt.

~~~
jacques_chester
Last time I complained about this, someone blamed it on Apple Maps.

Some drivers have both, mostly so they can see the traffic data from Google
Maps. I like those drivers.

Edit: I'd actually be surprised if it was Google Maps at fault, given that
their Maps team has a large contingent in the NYC office.

~~~
CPLX
Things dramatically improved recently when they added a link to Waze in the
Uber app.

And by improved I mean the drivers went from genuinely lost, misdirected, and
clueless to merely confused and unaware of their surroundings but traveling
vaguely in the right direction.

------
koolba
Note that this is uber pool and is limited to a section of Manhattan (below
125th street). It's $100 for two weeks or $200 for a month.

Business idea! Sign up for unlimited uber rides and resell them for cash. Just
stand on a corner where people are waiting for cabs, charge them $5 in cash to
go where they want, and then call an uber pool for them.

~~~
jessriedel
Below 125th street is something like 80% of Manhattan's area and probably 90%
of the population (including half of Harlem), so it's really not particularly
limited. They just are cutting off the outskirts since there likely isn't a
high enough density of UberPool users up there for it to make sense.

~~~
frewsxcv
90% of Manhattan? Maybe. 90% of NYC? Definitely not.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City)

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apatters
Not only is Forbes a publication which forces people to disable ad blockers
and then serves them malware-laden ads, but they have also written a headline
here which is misleading through omission of crucial details.

At least I assume the headline on HN represents the Forbes headline
accurately, but I don't know, because they won't let me read their content.

I think that Forbes should be blacklisted on HN.

------
chadlavi
Only in Manhattan, and the $100 is only TWO weeks. A full month is $200.

As one of the 80% of New Yorkers who live in the other 4 boroughs, this is
useless to me.

~~~
manacit
Not to mention that the part of town this is limited to is extremely well
covered by almost every train, which will virtually always be faster (and
cheaper) than getting into an Uber Pool that's going to hop around and pick
people up.

~~~
vonmoltke
This is especially true for people like me (starting in November) who take the
metro trains into Grand Central or Penn. The transfer to the subway from those
is almost frictionless.

------
eli
They rolled a version of this out in DC months ago with a marketing campaign
cleverly tied to major track work on the Metro.

[http://dcinno.streetwise.co/2016/07/29/uber-dc-monthly-
pass-...](http://dcinno.streetwise.co/2016/07/29/uber-dc-monthly-pass-during-
metro-safetrack/)

Very reasonable price (I suspect, in fact, they lose money on it). Service is
OK. I prefer to take a bus but not everyone has a convenient bus line.

~~~
mikeash
They're pretty up front about losing money on it. "Uber had promised to invest
$10 million in D.C. during the SafeTrack program in a mix of ways. That
includes offering financial incentives for drivers while still discounting
UberPool this summer in D.C. Some of the money applies to incentives for the
Pool Pass as well, since otherwise drivers would not likely feel very
motivated to take a $1 fare."

It will be interesting to see how Uber shakes out in the long term. They can't
keep this up forever.

~~~
eli
I have certainly seen it cause many more people to give Pool a try. They are
(were?) doing a flat-rate $3 price with no commitment for Pool rides that
start and end within a zone downtown and surrounding neighborhoods. Great
deal.

------
thenipper
There is an irony in that the people that could easily afford to do this won't
want to because they'll have to share the car...

------
awesomerobot
This is actually a worse deal compared to the existing Uber Pool Pass for
people commuting to a 9-5 20/40 times a week — using that service put you at
~$4/ride.

Interesting to see Uber attempting to compete at a slightly-more than public
transit price, but it still seems unsustainable when it comes to paying
drivers a fair wage.

------
untog
There's probably something to be said here about Uber limiting this to
Manhattan - by far and away the most subway-covered area of the city - and not
somewhere like East New York that's crying out for transit.

Of course, they do so to make money, and I don't begrudge them that. But it
goes some way to highlight the fact that Uber is mostly certainly not a tide
that raises all ships.

(as an entirely different aside, the roads in Manhattan are already terrible,
and the subway is already quicker for a lot of journeys. Once you add in the
fact that the Pool takes you far out of your way... eh.)

------
qntty
$100 for a weird two-week initial period. Reads like:

[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

------
rdlecler1
I called an UberPool in Manhattan at around 3:00 on a weekday. It was a 10
minute wait and when it did arrive the car already had four other passengers
in the car. In many cases it's much faster and cheaper to take the train/cab.

------
zaidf
It is $200 this month. Chances are they will increase the price or put a cap
the following month as they did in SF. The SF subscription isn't all that
attractive anymore.

------
technofiend
My median San Francisco uberpool fare was (rounded) $3. Assuming similar per-
mile rates it doesn't take long to break even.

------
devy
Uber's privatization of public transits [1] at big cities now begins.

[1]: [http://www.inc.com/damon-brown/in-the-ultimate-coup-uber-
tak...](http://www.inc.com/damon-brown/in-the-ultimate-coup-uber-takes-over-
citys-mass-transit.html)

------
LAMike
Ban fortune.com

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thesimpsons1022
i could see this really catching on IF employers paid for it as a benefit.

------
johnnymonster
laff, forbes won't let me use their site with an ad blocker.

~~~
new299
You're lucky. You also get to avoid the autoplaying video with audio. I'd
recommend the mods switch to the timeout link.

------
merrvk
Useful seeing as they dont know how to drive trains over there

------
jflowers45
Inaccurate clickbait title. How about "New Yorkers can now get unlimited
UberPool inside Manhattan for $50/week"

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JumpCrisscross
The page comes up blank for me, likely due to my content blockers. Alternate
link: [https://www.timeout.com/newyork/blog/you-can-buy-
unlimited-u...](https://www.timeout.com/newyork/blog/you-can-buy-unlimited-
uberpool-passes-for-october-092616)

~~~
technofiend
We need a site ban for forbes.com due to their actively filtering people with
ad blocking and history of serving up malware-laden ads. Thank you for the
alternate link.

~~~
reacharavindh
Yes, I have a mental filter to just not click any links to forbes.com. If
there were more people who feel the same way, may be we can avoid posting them
to HN on account of convenience. (I have nothing against forbes. If they
choose to not cater to people with ad blockers, it is their choice. But, I
think it's HN community's choice to avoid them.)

------
dorianm
The title is correct now ($200 instead of $100), from Uber's website[1]:

    
    
        Unlimited uberPOOL in Manhattan/2 weeks ($100 fee)
        Unlimited uberPOOL in Manhattan/4 weeks ($200 fee)
    

[1]:
[https://www.uber.com/info/plus/newyork/](https://www.uber.com/info/plus/newyork/)

