![]() ![]() So does Papazyan.Can I assume your same advice for the reverse trip, PEV to FLL? If you needed a reminder, the calendar says it’s November, and you know what that means. In the meantime, try a ride-sharing van out of LAX, take a bus, drive your own car, or fly out of Burbank, Ontario or Long Beach, even if it means having to catch a connecting flight. Papazyan said he’d like to see a return to the days before Uber and Lyft had full delivery and pickup privileges at LAX, but that’s not likely to happen.Īnd it’s likely we’ll be stuck with some degree of chaos until 2023, when an elevated people mover is scheduled to begin tracking passengers from terminals to car rentals, a ground transportation hub and a Metro station. Not just us, but the biggest problems are for families with kids and luggage,” Papazyan said. “It’s too much stress for a lot of people. He said he was trying to avoid LAX, because it had taken him more than an hour to go just a few blocks and pick up passengers. In September, I rode from Union Station to LAX with Yellow Cab driver Oganes Papazyan, and I called him Tuesday to ask about the airport madness of the last week. “If they started with an incorrect number of trips, that could lead someone to conclude that Uber and Lyft were underreporting trips,” Rouse said, “which would mean they were also underpaying on their airport surcharges they owe for every pickup and drop-off.” But now he has a couple of theories on what might have gone wrong.Įither traffic engineers had inaccurate numbers about how many pickup vehicles were coming to the airport each day, or the numbers were accurate but the planners miscalculated how long it would take those cars to get to the new remote pickup points, Rouse said. But when did we all become so special that we couldn’t handle even the slightest inconvenience?Īs for the scene at LAX, Rouse said he attended meetings at which the pickup transition was planned, and he thought at the time that airport staffers were on top of things. But he said going to LAX was dreadful, partly because of the traffic and partly because entitled passengers blamed him for delays. My son was between jobs when he drove for Uber and Lyft, which kept him afloat, just barely. In some ways, Uber and Lyft were brilliant, and for some drivers, making a few bucks while setting their own schedules and serving as their own bosses was attractive. ![]() ![]() Back then, one of Uber’s marketing tricks was that you didn’t need to give your driver a little something extra. I picked up 12 fares, made $12.22 an hour after subtracting the cost of gas, and did not get a single tip. And some cab companies were too slow to respond to the tech innovations that gave rise to the competition.Ī few years ago, I became an Uber driver for a few weeks to experience it firsthand. Not that the cab industry was ever the best-run enterprise, with a history of run-down vehicles and meter-rigging scandals. The cab companies are at a decided disadvantage, competing not just against lower prices but against much larger fleets. “You’ve got Uber and Lyft in a years-long price war, where they’re using investor dollars in order to artificially suppress prices,” said William Rouse, general manager of Yellow Cab of Los Angeles. ![]() So now we have a billion cars a day inching their way in and out of LAX, and we’re ticked off about a problem we helped create.Īnd in the process, we’re propping up Uber and Lyft, whose drivers are making close to minimum wage while beating up their own vehicles and putting more of a squeeze on taxi drivers, who used to cash a decent paycheck before we all began telling one another about how much we love our ride-hailing apps. ![]()
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