November 1, 2006
Formalizing Taxi Shares to the Airport
A new website is launching next week to help New Yorkers share cabs to and from area airports. The hitchsters.com press release notes how cabs are the most convenient - and expensive - way to get to airports. Here are details on how things would work:
After a user enters in some date, time and other travel information, the patent pending matching system begins looking for a suitable co-rider who matches the user’s criteria. Once a match is made, hitchsters.comHitchsters will launch on November 11. It should be interesting to see how this works. We imagine the underlying assumption is that people will be able to hail cabs in a timely manner and will pick up all of the passengers. And we guess the rides would be shared by people in the same basic area - or someone headed from the West Side, stopping over to the East Side for others, before heading to JFK or LaGuardia.
sends each co-rider an e-mail and an SMS message with the phone number and first name of the other rider so they can connect to share a cab.As an additional safety feature and a way to offer social networking possibilities, hitchsters.com provides users with the option to select a “gender preference” (the matching application will attempt to meet this preference, but if unsuccessful will disregard it to ensure a match is made and the user can save some cash) or a “gender requirement” (if a suitable co-rider with the user’s required gender is not available, then no match is made). A user’s selection of this feature is never revealed to the other co-rider.
Additionally, hitchsters.com saves a record of all matches as an extra safety precaution. On the one hand, anyone can use hitchsters.com to share a cab to and from the airport, and all users use it at their own risk and must use good judgment, but on the other hand, as Gloria Crawford, the Vice President of Marketing for hitchsters.com, notes, “Whenever someone gets into a cab, they are getting into a car with a stranger, and we think three strangers are safer than two.”
The Daily News spoke to Taxi and Limousine Commissioner Matthew Daus about hitchsters, and he said, "It is economical and environmentally conscious, and a great way to maximize our taxicabs." Speaking of environmentally conscious, bring on more hybrids cabs! We just rode in a hybrid SUV taxi and it was great - the driver was very enthusiastic as well.
Would you use a service like this? Do you use the craigslist Ride Share listings? Or are buses (public and private) and the subway reliable enough?
Photograph by edEx on Flickr
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PROOFREAD YOUR FUCKING POSTS!
Althoguh this could be really convenient, I could see it raising potential problems. Check out the "Rules of the Road" from their site:
"Meeting Up. You have to do everything reasonable to connect with your co-rider. hitchsters will stink if people leave others hanging.
Splitting the Fare.When you get out of the cab, you pay 60% of the fare (including tolls) to that point. That’s the rule, unless you want to treat. Either bring change or round up.
Breaking a Tie: Can’t agree on who gets out first? Rock/paper/scissors.
Safety. While it is important to be open to meeting new people if you want to save money using hitchsters, you are under no obligation to share a cab with someone that creeps you out(Please e-mail us and let us know if this happens)."
If the TLC really supports ridesharing, they should just formalize it at taxi stands around the city.
It's pretty simple. All the taxi stand person would have to do is yell out:
"Hey, anyone going to midtown on the east side?"
Then the person closest to the front that says yes would be able to skip to the front of the line and share the cab.
I suspect that the real reason behind the gender preferences is "to offer social networking possibilities." Safety shouldn't be a consideration because the sharing would take place in a taxi with a driver present.
As some of the routes into Washington require at least three people in a vehicle during rush hour, there's a practice called "slugging" which involves people queuing up in certain locations to make informal car pools. It's a totally unregulated practice. While it might seem risky, slugging's been around for over 20 years and in all that time there have been almost no crime-related incidents.
jen: thanks for publishing another photo!
Does anyone know how this web site plans to make money? Are they going to charge for their services? I could see if working if the company kept users' credit card information and would penalize them if they delayed their co-rider.
"Or are buses (public and private) and the subway reliable enough?"
Have you forgotten about the LIRR and the Air Train? I use JFK a lot for personal travel, so I just hop in a cab to Penn Station, then grab the LIRR to Jamaica and switch to the Air Train. It is pretty convenient, and cheap to boot.
#7, so you take three modes of transportation to get to a fourth mode of transport? How long does it take you?
The Numbers Guy (Carl Bialik) on today's WSJ online mentions hitchsters.com and the 60% rule:
Terry Crawford, the founder of Hitchsters.com Inc. -- a New York company that next week plans to launch a Web service connecting air travelers for shared taxi rides -- emailed me to let me know he'd read my column last year that asked economists to weigh in on the best way to split the fare on a shared cab ride. Mr. Crawford inviting me to examine his fare-sharing strategy. At launch, the service will be arranging only two-person rides, limiting the number of available payment permutations. The first rider to leave the cab pays 60% of the fare to that point, including tolls but not tip. If both riders leave together -- a more-likely scenario on, say, trips to the airport -- they each pay 60% and the extra goes toward the tip. "The hope is that the taxi drivers don't get ripped off," Gloria Crawford, vice president of marketing and Mr. Crawford's wife, told me.
I asked Barry Nalebuff, a professor at the Yale School of Management who weighed in for my earlier column, to comment on this system. "I think the point of the first person paying 60% is that this person is getting better service, in that he or she is being dropped off first," he said. "Thus that person should pay more. How much more? It is a bit arbitrary. It depends on how much the second person is being taken out of his or her way. This adds both extra time and extra cost to the total. While it is hard to figure this out on a case-by-case basis, the 60% rule seems reasonable as a rule of thumb."
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116248159346111395-RzfP27ryzGNTnSXeFbztjM_ZiRw_20071102.html
This is a copy of the Columbia University website, http://www.carsplit.com which came out last year.