Comments For Entry #4043

Uber is getting worse(Comments RSS)

I have been increasingly dissatisfied with Uber's service. As I recently crossed the mark of over 400 rides, I long for the early days of Uber. Here are some of the challenges I see:

1) with its massive scale, the quality of drivers has gone downhill. and with it, ride quality. the vast majority of drivers now drive exactly like cab drivers, heavy of the accelerator and break. this makes for terrible ride comfort at best, and motion sickness at worst. the experience is poor. when i hire a black car, i expect smooth stars and stops and non-intrusive driving. not happening anymore in 90% of the rides

2) tipping. don't get me started with this. uber epitomizes convenience and it's about to ruin it by adding a tipping option to the app. i don't mind tipping drivers for good service but don't make me push buttons and decide for every single ride, i simply don't want to do. i love jumping in and out without ever pushing a single button. if current pay is unfair, fine, increase what riders pay and roll it into the cost of the ride. but don't make me work. an added annoyance is that a non trivial number of drivers have started to use to rating system to differentiate which riders do vs do not tip them. that's as ugly as it gets.

3) completing a trip nearby. this is increasingly become a standard prompt you get when you get assigned a car. you are doomed, as typically means you will wait on average 15 minutes even in NYC before your drive arrives. the app will usually hang and won't even show you trip progress. every single time, i've had to call the driver to understand what's going on. it's a bad experience, and should not be allowed

4) drivers are increasingly calling riders now and they demand you meet them vs them coming exactly to where you are. this is annoying. and also increasingly often, once they understand where you are and where you are going, they may cancel your trip if not convenient for them. awful. this all comes from poor screening and low quality drivers hired in large numbers by uber to keep up. this piles on and makes again for a poor experience.

5) the app has become pretty bloated and slow even on reasonably new phones. takes a lot more clicks now to book vs. what it used to. also, payments wise, you used to be able to set it to use your points and it would do so until you switched it or you ran out of points. doesn't work that way anymore, it only lets you do 1 trip at a time with points, and then resets. this is actually quite infuriating as it's a passive aggressive move to get you to use less points and more cash.

6) time to pick up. even not accounting for the "completing trip nearby", the pick up time has escalated out of control. it's rare for me in NYC to wait less than 10 minutes for a car which is ridiculous. it used to be almost instantaneous

7) more app tricks: pricing. the alarming surge pricing alerts are gone, but the app is still increasing the prices when it wants to and shows you inflated costs. by removing the clear warnings they've managed to trick us into accepting more fares at inflated prices.

I won't even go into the tricks the app plays with drivers and riders, showing different routes and ripping off both sides, and other dirty tricks.

All in all, in my experience as a reasonably frequent user, the quality of the service has deteriorated in a meaningful way, especially over the past 2 years.


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