This is a fun story—but he should've just booked a round-trip rental car, and dropped it off in Dayton anyway. I've done this a bunch of times, and all they'll do is charge you the one-way rate and grumble a bit...
"This fee of $10 will be applied if you return your car to a different location from that which was scheduled, or if you return more than 12 hours after the date and time previously scheduled, and you notify us of an extension of your rental by the return date and time previously scheduled by calling 1-800-654-4174.
If you do not notify us of such a change, the Late Return Fee of $12 per day, (maximum of 5 days) will apply."
Elsewhere, the contract notes: "Any changes to the reservation may impact the rental charges."
Which is what will happen here. They'll charge you this fee, but also adjust the base rental charges to much higher rates that reflect the fleet management burden caused by one-way rentals.
When I talked to Enterprise on the phone about one-way use, they explicitly told me most places will waive the charge unless they don't have space to take the inventory. Rental car places have a lot of fixed capital costs like hotels, and renting the car at anything above a significant loss still recoups those costs. You can usually just ask for things. I've been offered upgrades pretty routinely just because they don't have the vehicle I asked for. They've always tried to charge me for the upgrade, but then I say "can you give me the rate I originally reserved?" and usually they give it to me.
Interesting that they’ve always tried to charge you for the upgrade - I’ve always gotten it for free without having to ask (though I use Avis almost entirely and can’t remember the last time I used Enterprise). They just tell me “Sorry we were out of this car, here’s an upgraded one”. Seems weird that they should charge you more for not having the car you booked. Granted, they never dump me into sports cars when it happens (it’s almost always the very next tier of car available).
What's the benefit in lying to them about your intentions? Is it just because nobody wants to rent you a car one way in the first place?
My (very limited and probably outdated) understanding of the rental car industry is that the locations are franchises and the cars are owned by the franchise. If you rent a car round trip and leave it in some other city they have to deal with getting it back.
According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18332918 (surprisingly, on the SERP for "voluntary parting"), that's an insurer's term, not a lawyer's—but the police might still refuse to take a police report anyway.
(Though I do wonder if "Hi, I'm a photographer and I lent my camera on the internet" and "Hi, I'm with the loss department of a major national rental car company" get you different responses from the police for reasons entirely unrelated to the legal status of the misdeed.)
Once I rented a car in Seattle one way to Vancouver. Apparently there is some shitburg nobody has ever heard of called Vancouver, WA but I was going to the more famous Canadian city. The flunkie at the counter booked the domestic trip and I drove to the proper Vancouver. When I got there they tried to charge me over $8000 in fees. I think there is no practical upper bound to what they'll try to charge you for such things.
Please keep regional slurs off this site. Imagine if you were one of HN's readers in Vancouver WA and read this comment. Not nice, and quite unnecessary for your point. Ditto for "the flunkie at the counter". We don't need comments here that think they're that much better than other people.
You shouldn't project your obliviousness on everyone else.
Vancouver, WA is a suburb of and part of the greater Portland area. Also referred to as the Portland / Vancouver metropolitan area.
It's completely understandable that the "flunkie" at the counter assumed someone leaving from the largest city in Washington would be be referring to the 4th largest city in Washington (Vancouver).
This is why we need a train system with funding parity to the highway and airport systems. There should be trains leaving constantly, at most every 10 minutes, from Chicago to the east, and frequent, semihourly, trains between neighboring cities along the way.
Even if the author could rent a car, having to drive 300 miles is astounding waste of time and mental energy.
There are 5 different Greyhound buses next Monday from Chicago to Dayton (called "Dayton Trotwood"), ranging from $36 to $90, all taking about 7 hours. There are some passenger trains in the US—I've actually gone overnight from Rochester, NY, to Milwaukee, WI, via train when a flight was canceled—but bus travel is just how you get to medium-sized US cities, for better or for worse. 188 US cities are larger than Dayton, and it's only the 6th largest city in Ohio.
Of course, it's not as nice as having regular, smooth, fast trains. But the situation is not as dire as people make it out to be.
I can’t imagine a train leaving every 10 minutes could ever be cost effective. There just aren’t that many people who want to do that trip (8 hours?) when you could do it in 2 hours by plane.
It is not two hours. The flight time from my home town to Moscow is 50 minutes. Whole trip is about 6 hours.
Get to the airport, takes about 1 hour (drive 60k or 40 miles). If you don’t have a car - even longer.
You arrive in advance, security, luggage check in then boarding, then runway.
It’s been around 3 hours so far.
Now you fly for 50 to 70 minutes and it doesn’t include the plane driving through airport after landing.
Get off, grab you luggage - another 40 minutes easily. 15 if you’re lucky.
Now you need to get to the city, so it is 2 hours by car through Moscow traffic or 1 hour using “aero express” train.
The thing is, once you get off this “aero express” train, chances are it is still about one hour trip on subway to the office/apartment.
I used to fly like that, I was leaving my parents apartment at about 4-30am to arrive by 10/11am.
Compare it to train - it takes 13 hours but it leaves from the city centre, no security check in’s no nothing, you take 30 minutes to arrive there. It leaves at 6-30pm, you have supper and sleep. 7-30am BOOM you’re in the center of Moscow right next to subway station. Brush you’re teeth during approach, have your breakfast and off you pop.
It feels muuuuch better on the train. Air travel overhead is just too big - 5 hours or something for hour of the flight time. With train you have about two hours of overhead.
The only thing it is almost twice as expensive compared to air travel
From an article last year about new train prototypes in Tokyo:
> Chris Jackson, the editor-in-chief of Railway Gazette International, based in London, said JR East wanted to raise their maximum train speed to 224 miles per hour to achieve a journey time between Tokyo to Sapporo that rivals flying.
> Currently, the world’s fastest trains in regular service run between Beijing and Shanghai, in China, at speeds up to 217 miles an hour, he said.
Sapporo is over 500 miles from Tokyo, and the trains might be faster than a 600mph plane ride...
But you can only get to Hakodate... The shinkansen tracks to Sapporo aren't finished yet (unless I've missed something). It takes nearly as long to go from Hakodate to Sapporo as it does to go from Tokyo to Hakodate :-) I wonder if they are really serious about that...
When I was in Hokkaido the opening of the track was rumoured for about 2030. (usual disclaimer, you got it from a guy on the internet, etc)
Also, the trip through the Seikan tunnel (the 33.46 miles undersea tunnel connecting Honshu with Hokkaido) enforces relatively slow speeds, since it's shared with other, slower trains. They would probably have to implement significant extensions that it could be approached with Shinkansen speed.
That said, the train trip between Hakodate and Sapporo is a rather nice one. Aided by a Bento box and a couple of Asahis it's a pleasurable experience. Even if you don't have the over-the-top Shinkansen luxury and speed.
On the minus side I had to stay a night in Hakodate, because appart from the first two trains to Tokyo there was no seat available on any other train. No matter in which class, alas, that was the Sunday, which marked the end of golden week.
Hakodate, while certainly not what you expect of magic Japan, has its attractions in its own rights. Especially when you arrive during the end days of the cherry blossom and there's that really great sushi place, which was a lot cheaper than anything comparable in Tokyo.
I digress, most definitely, but - ahh - I really want to go back to Japan.
In America, most people don’t live near a city center big enough to warrant an intercity train station. 75% of Moscow’s metro area lives in city limits. There is no US city like that. For DC, it’s less than 20%. Also, in America 88% of households own a car, versus 55% in Russia.
I can be at my local airport (Baltimore) in less than 30 minutes, and be seated in another 30 minutes if I’m traveling early. If I lived in real America, somewhere like Kansas City or Buffalo, it’d take like 15-20 minutes to get from parking to the airplane.
To your point, I thought Columbus, OH, would be a good candidate for a large city limits population. According to Wikipedia, "Columbus adopted a policy of linking sewer and water hookups to annexation to the city." This means that Columbus proper includes low density areas which would typically be suburbs outside the city limits of most cities.
Even still, the city population was about 880K in 2018, with a metro area of 2.4MM. So even in a US city with a somewhat aggressive annexation policy, still only about ⅓ of the population lives within the city limits. And Columbus has no passenger trains, anyway, neither intracity nor intercity.
In general trains stop in more central locations than airports, which usually get sited far away from people who might complain about the noise. And if you set up the system to do so, trains can stop multiple times within a metropolitan area for easier access. Tokaido Shinkansen trains call at Tokyo, Shingawa, and Shin-Yokohama; the ICE stops at Berlin Ostkreuz, Hbf and Spandau going west, or Gesundbrunnen, Hbf and Sudkreuz going south.
> Well you also have to commute to train stations.
True enough.
I live almost equidistantly from three international airports, all, nominally (that is without traffic) about 75 minutes drive away.
The closest main train station is a 15 minute bike ride away or a 10 minute drive away (without traffic). Funnily enough the local train station is slightly further away both by car and bike.
True, takes me 15 minutes from door to (train) door and I don't have to endure the usual airport security shit and calculate a buffer time of a minimum of 60 minutes, which can be significantly longer, depending on the airport.
Sure, not every country (notably the US) offers such privileged amenities, but where a good train network is available trips up to six hours are definitely doable, if not preferable.
As the crow flies, Chicago to New York is similar to Beijing to Shanghai, which is a long-ish high-speed-rail journey of 4.5 hours. If you have to fight lots of traffic to get to the airport that's not too bad. Probably not enough to drive demand for every ten minutes.
The real value of such a network would be an intermediate trip. If Cleveland or Pittsburgh are both two hours away from New York and Chicago and the trip is downtown to downtown, demand for air travel from these mid-size cities to the larger ones would pretty much dry up save for connecting flights. And the strength of rail is that you could have some trains stop multiple times within a metropolitan area, so that you don't have to drive to a centrally located transportation hub the way you have to do with an airport. And if you add rail stops to the airport you don't even need the connecting flights anymore.
You probably wouldn't get the high-speed rail to Bradford OH directly though. The closest you'd get is Dayton OH, but thankfully that's a more doable 30+ mile Lyft ride.
LGA to ORD is 3 million passengers per year. Beijing to Shanghai is 7 million by air, plus 180 million by train (including intermediate stops). Total US air travel between all destinations is only 750 million per year. The ability of the Chinese to recoup their capital investment through ridership is massive compared to what you could expect in the US.
It's worth noting that at least some of that 180 million is travel induced by the availability of the train in the first place. There are plenty of city pairs that people don't travel between because
* plane travel is too much of a hassle for such a short trip, and usually expensive
Rail passengers to Denver, CO, in 1869, numbered nil. Construction of the 100 mile Denver Pacific spur line to the transcontinental railroad route in Cheyenne not only increased that somewhat, but saw Denver's population grow from 4,700 th over 35,000 within ten years.
You can only induce as much travel demand as there are people to potentially travel. No amount of induced demand will let US travel infrastructure transport the number of people that Chinese travel infrastructure does.
the number of people that Chinese travel infrastructure does
... and that's not my argument. But lowered real costs -- not merely price, but time, convenience, flexibility, time-sharing (work/eat/sleep in transit), predictability, safety, baggage allownce, efficiency gains, and more -- should increase effective utility and utilisation.
The biggest pitfalls of rail have been right-of-way acquisition in mature economic regimes (high induced land values, themselves a result in large part of improved transport, impede further transport development), transfers and mode-transitions (especially rail-to-local endpoint travel), and technological lock-in and stagnation.
China has the benefits of late adoption, relatively low economic development, and critically, a regime of weak real (land) property rights. All enable it to adopt recent and advanced technologies, and to plan and acquire rights of way at low cost.
Even in parts of the United States where China's other, and more usually noted advantage, exceedingly high population density, is more closely matched, the US is hugely hampered by built rail infrastructure and extant technologies, high land values, and an increasingly oppressive private land ownership tradition.
> The biggest pitfalls of rail have been right-of-way acquisition in mature economic regimes (high induced land values, themselves a result in large part of improved transport, impede further transport development), transfers and mode-transitions (especially rail-to-local endpoint travel), and technological lock-in and stagnation.
Rail is more expensive than roads in the US even where the right of way already exists. The Silver Line was built along an existing right of way and still cost $250 million per mile. (There is tons of excess freeway median in the US that could cost rail.) The problem is actually the high cost of skilled labor in the US. I don’t suppose you’d consider US labor rights to be “oppressive.”
Boston's 'Big Dig" urban centre highway construction created 2 miles of roadbed at. costs of $15 - $24 billion, (up to $12 billion/mi), carrying 536,000 vehicles/day. At an average of 1.55 occupancy rating, about 830,000 passengers/day. Two miles.
DC Metro's Silver Line is 29.6 miles long, has 26 stations, and cost $6.8 billion, or $229 million/mi, roughly one tenth the cost of Boston's freeway project.
Peak capacity at 26 8-car trains of 120 passenger earch per hour is just under 25,000 passengers/hr. Over nearly 30 miles. Or roughly 750,000 passenger miles per hour, as compared with 70,000 passenger-miles/hr sustained for the Gig Dig.
Note that, yes, I'm comparing Metro peak with Boston daily average. The >10x advantage remains. "More than 70% of rail ridership occurs during the morning and evening rush hours, and 43% of these commuters ride Metro in a one-hour time period' (WMATA Core Capacity study).
This gives us about 3,200 passenger-mile/$billion for urban highway, versus 110,000 passenger-mile/$billion for DC Metro.
Metro wins handily. Rail is 34x more cost effective than highway.
> Note that, yes, I'm comparing Metro peak with Boston daily average. The >10x advantage remains. "More than 70% of rail ridership occurs during the morning and evening rush hours, and 43% of these commuters ride Metro in a one-hour time period"
I don't understand what you're trying to say here. It looks like you want to draw a comparison between carrying capacity for a road and carrying capacity for a railroad. OK.
What does "the >10x advantage remains" mean? Remains after making what adjustment? The quote you provide immediately after that sentence severely undermines your implicit claim that rail is efficient by pointing out that, although the Silver Line's capacity is high, that capacity is worthless because almost all of it goes unused.
Also, you're not doing the passenger-miles-per-hour math correctly. To get maximum possible passenger-miles-per-hour, multiply 25,000 passengers by the average speed of the trains, yielding an answer in units of passenger-miles-per-hour. You multiplied 25,000 passengers by 30 miles, yielding 750,000 passenger-miles (not per-hour). (As it happens, the average speed is 33 mph, so you slightly underestimated peak capacity... except that, of course, peak capacity in reality is much, much lower, unless you'd like to force people onto the Metro.)
You're at least attacking the weakest point of my argument, admitted in my comment you're replying to. Yes, the actual throughput is lower than the max, but the comparison still seems to favour rail.
Rayiner had tossed out the example of DC's Silver Line, though without bothering to state just what his argument was. I pulled Boston's BD project and ran with what numbers I could find (surprisigly scarce) to try to come up with some kind of metric for comparing total ridership capacity provided. Utility in daily trips served matters far more than cost-per-mile. And I hazily recollect that short-headway rail (DC Metro manages ... 6 minutes, by one statement, 26 trains/hr, or 2 minute headways (possibly bidirectional?) by another) does far better than a controlled-access highway.
My interest in doing unpaid, unreciprocated consulting for rayiner, esq., is rapidly diminishing, so I left off with some hazy numbers, but at least signalled that they are in fact hazy.
A USDoT source gives a maximum capacity of 2300 vph for a highway in good weather at 65mph.
And another sorce provided a 1.55 passengers/car loading factor, US average.
The WMATA source given earlier gives 26 trains/hr, 6 cars/train (actual in service, 8 cars possible), and 120 passengers/car (162% of seated load) as maximum capacity.
Multiplication gives 18,720 passengers/hr peak throughput, a bit over 12,000 passenger vehicles, or 5.25 lanes of highway capacity. I'd counted mileage to account for the difference in project lengths: Silver == 30 miles, Big Dig less than two. Point being that the spend of the two projects delivers very different total travel utility.
WMATA's Estimated average daily ridership, all lines, 2020: 1 million. Better than the Big Dig total.
As for rail and efficiency: unlike highways, rail (through traffic coordination and limiteds) can achieve both higher throughput and shorter trip times (balanced by less frequent service to a given destination) than highways. Trip times are overall more predictable. Safety and other factors, to both users and pedestrians, tends to be better than highways also.
Further factor are that rail service (which may or may not be bundled in project costs) includes rolling stock and maintenance facilities, as well as fuel/power, and maintenance, all provided by users of highways. Rolling stock lifetimes are generally measured in decades vs. years for autos.
On the cost side, you’re comparing apples and oranges: building through downtown Boston in a tunnel compared to building through exurban Virginia above ground on an existing right of way.
A better point of comparison to the Silver Line is the inter-county connector in MD. Both built in the 2010s. $127 million per mile, which includes land acquisition costs because it wasn’t built along an existing right of way like the Silver Line.
You’re also completely off on the ridership side. Because rail only takes you on inflexible routes, actual ridership is low except in dense downtown cores. The Silver Line operates nowhere near capacity. Silver Line ridership is under 17,000 passengers per day. The inter county connector averages 30-40,000. So more than double the ridership for half the per mile cost.
You claimed that land acquisition was the cost driver. I used the silver line as an example of because it’s a relatively rare situation where the land acquisition cost was low because it is carried in a freeway median that was originally designed to host a metro extension.
I don’t see how you go from that to a comparison against literally the most expensive road tunnel in US history, especially given that the whole point of the silver line example is that it runs through the exurbs on an existing freeway median.
I used the silver line as an example of because it’s a relatively rare situation where the land acquisition cost was low because it is carried in a freeway median
I'm not intimately familiar with the project (and had to ask you which specifically you'd meant), and you failed to adequately develop your argument between sly ad homs.
I'm proposing that land aquisition, as a net factor -- fighting NIMBY battles, as an example, would be a component -- is one of at least three factors disadvantaging rail vs highway construction in the US.
And yet despite this, your own cherry-picked example comes out far ahead, even allowing for what I'd noted were rough and likely advantageous numbers, than a contemporaneous urban highway project. You've not presented much by way of numbers or cites yourself.
If you don't mind a personal observation: you come across, repeatedly and not only with me, as so bent on burying your counterparties that you constantly shift burdens of proof, fail to construct or support your arguments sufficiently, or care to accidentally learn anything along the way. I honestly didn'y know how the Silver vs. Dig comparison would turn out. I simply followed the maths to their conclusion.
It doesn’t matter. Pretty much every place that has enough people going in the same direction to fill a rail line already has one. Meanwhile, rail outside those downtown cores is vastly underutilized. The I-270/I-495 interchange (which connects the DC Beltway to the inner suburb of Montgomery county) carries 760,000 vehicles per day, more than the entire ridership of the DC Metro, and double that of the LA Metro.
As a less extreme example, Paris - Lyon was the first TGV line in 1980. In 1980 they were about the same size as Chicago and Cleveland today, except there’s a lot more built up between Chicago and Cleveland to serve.
Note that even with that exceptional HSR, most fly between Beijing and Shanghai. And that's with the ridiculous Chinese rules that prevent you from using your phone during all flights. And Chicago/New York would be more like 5.5 hours.
No, that is not realistic. With all the fucked up security nonsense and checkin times, and the time you need to get to the airport(s), its likely more like 5 or 6 hours vs 8. And considering the environmental footprint of a flight, I would happily take the train route, thank you.
a 2 hour flight isn't 2 hours, there is also the 1-2 hours getting into the plane itself and the 1-2 hours getting off it and this is before we get into having to drive out to the deep outskirts of the city to even begin that process.
That actually was about as close to free as it gets. At least it was for the similar money (same program) that Wisconsin turned down.
In Wisconsin’s case it was about $800MM with no local match needed and the catch was committing to running the service for 20 years.
Even as someone who wasn’t a big fan of the project I’m still annoyed because we’ve now spent significantly more than 20 years of operating costs for work that would have been paid for if we took the money.
No, the train system should be reorganized. Having multiple stops slows down travel. If Amtrak used shorter trains with a direct route, and all freight trains yielded to passenger trains, people will use more trains.
Otherwise any train trip that takes over eight hours is unpalatable, no matter how bad airport security becomes.
The problem is Amtrak, at least in Northeast, is running on tracks mostly owned by the freight companies. No way they’re going to yield on the tracks they bought without Amtrak paying them handsomely for that.
There is nothing, except Chicago’s suburbs, within about 300 miles of Chicago in every direction.
Also, our train system has more than funding parity with roads. Road spending is about $175 billion per year, about half of which isn’t recovered from use fees, for 5 trillion passenger miles. That’s about $0.02 per mile subsidy. Amtrak’s capital expenditures is about $900 million per year, which comes directly from Congress. (Ticket revenue only goes to operating costs.) that’s about $0.13 per passenger mile.
For a guy driving 300 miles, that cost the government $6.00 in road construction and maintenance. For the guy to train that same distance costs the government $39.
You mean besides Milwaukee, Madison, Grand Rapids, Indianapolis, Cedar Rapids, St Louis, Cincinatti and Toledo?
That's more people than Chicago itself.
If you take Chicagoland as an endpoint and not the city boundaries, Des Moines is also within 300 miles.
Transcontinental high speed rail is, I agree strongly with your subtextual argument, a pipe dream. But regional HSR in the midwest would make a lot of sense.
Honestly I'd start with high frequency, non-high-speed rail. With no new track or stations, a lot of routes would be competitive with driving if they just ran more often and reliably.
One problem is that the rail routes themselves are incredibly expensive; they involve rights of way through valuable urban land and across multiple states. If you're going to invest billions in new passenger rail routes, you need the ridership to fund it, and if you're running the kinds of routes Amtrak does today (outside of Acela), you're not getting those riders.
One reason existing tracks and routes don't run that frequently is that there aren't the passengers to make them worthwhile. Another is that those tracks are also used for freight.
I'm starting to realise that a major war (and frequently being on the (or a) losing side) is a strong prerequisite for establishing a strong rail network.
Otherwise land values rise too high and fast to establish rights of way.
The idea is my own, and not fully rigorous, but there are two general cases for rail infrastructure: de novo development amidst industrialisation, generally lower speed (80 mph max), and post-war (or post-occupation) development and expansion. Note that "prerequisite" != "sufficient requirement", and "strong" == notable, but not essential. Complex systems in reality are multidimensional.
The British and US rail systems were developed as industrialisation progressed, notably IR2 (coal, steam, iron) and IR3 (steel, electricity, precision).
The US rail system was further developed in the wake of depopulation, genocide, and land appropriation from the indigenous tribal peoples. Governmental land grants to railroads were a major funding mechanism.
Development of HSR has tended to be a Post-WWII phenomenon, originating in Japan, then France, Germany, elsewhere in Europe (though generally not the UK), and recently, China.
The usual factor cited has been density, which matters. But both national economic policy and rights-of-way acquisition costs are massive factors, which the more free-market, strong-private propert rights regimes of the US and UK resist.
Wikipedia's list of HSR systems excludes Switzerland, though lines are presently under construction there (notably GBT): including Belgium, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, Morocco, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Uzbekistan, and Turkey.
> There is nothing, except Chicago’s suburbs, within about 300 miles of Chicago in every direction.
My lord, what?! Three of the top 25 largest cities in the entire US are within 300 miles of Chicago (Columbus, Indianapolis, Detroit), and the Twin Cities (3rd largest metropolitan area in the US, larger than Chicago itself) are only 350 miles away.
That's a very convenient way to define parity. If we funded railroads at 175bn per year what would be subsidy come to? Presumably there would be a lot more passengers at that level.
Most of our rail network, outside the northeast corridor, is already vastly underutilized. Roads get more funding because that's what people use, and that's what's most convenient for 95% of people (who don't live in the downtown core of a major city) to use.
But regardless, you can get an idea from the EU. EU rail subsidies amount to 73 billion euro annually. EU rail carried 465 billion passenger-kilometers in 2017, or 300 billion passenger miles. That's a subsidy of $0.24 euro per passenger mile, even worse than Amtrak.
Roads are just really cheap to build and maintain. A 6-lane interstate highway costs $11 million per mile in urban-ish areas: http://blog.midwestind.com/cost-of-building-road. It's going to cost $1.4 billion to add four lanes to the 35 miles of the BW Parkway (which goes through a dense urban area connecting two major cities). At $40 million per mile, that's 1/6 of what it cost to build the Metro Silver line through less dense areas in an existing freeway median. That's 1/9 the per-mile cost of the purple line, a light rail line that mostly travels at grade without its own right of way.
I know you probably realize this but I think it's worth pointing out that even though it's cheap for the government to maintain roads, the total cost of transporting people by car on those roads includes much more than just the roads. Of course, it's politically difficult for the government to ask people to spend less on their cars and give the money to it instead so it can more efficiently and cleanly transport them by rail.
The point of the exercise is to look at air passenger statistics to get a broad sense of what the high watermark of usage would be, since air travel is the dominant way of navigating the continental US.
> air travel is the dominant way of navigating the continental US.
That's because, even with all its faults, averaged over all travelers it beats the heck out of all the other alternatives for trips that would take more than a few hours by car or train. Scalzi's experience, as messed up as it was, is an outlier.
The utter inability to get a one-way rental is quite obnoxious. Also the bit about how he was able to reserve a car, but he wasn't a charter flight. Hertz's utter incompetence on the phone was striking as well from some sort of bizarro catch-22 world.
This doesn't make any sense. When I reserve a rental car at Signature or any other FBO, I may or may not give my tail number, but I'm pretty sure that no one has ever checked. I could have arrived in the front door and rented the car. (No one does this, because the cars are more expensive rented this way than from a typical rental desk as the FBO takes a cut and sometimes the airport adds a cut as well.)
This sounds like Hertz just blew it or Signature didn't want to rent a car one-way to this guy and fobbed it off on Hertz.
[0] - FBO -> Fixed Base Operator, basically a service station for private aircraft (whether charters or not; most are not).
Is this current knowledge? I used to pick up one way rental cars from the airport but the last few times I tried ~5 years ago the clerk wanted a flight number. I didn’t bother to lie.
I don’t rent one way rentals from an FBO (because I have to come back and fly the plane home anyway), but when I do reserve local rentals for a trip, I give times but not tail number generally. That’s all current.
The entire rental car experience is ridiculously complicated and inefficient. Look at the difference in renting a Zipcar (owned by Avis) and a regular rental car company. With Zipcar I can reserve a car in minutes, pick up the car I actually reserved without waiting in line or even going into an office, get charged the amount I was quoted and not find out it's twice the cost from some hidden fees and taxes.
Zipcars are great, but their coverage has shrunk over time. There's maybe a 10th of the number of vehicles, and back then Enterprise (formerly car2go) had an almost equal number of vehicles (Enterprise shut it down a while back.
I don’t rent a ton of cars but Avis is the only company that seems to have it together. A couple months ago I rented a car from them only because it was the cheapest option. Got an email when my flight landed with my exact car and what spot it was in in the rental car garage. When I got to the car, the keys were in the ignition and I just drove away. I was very surprised how pleasant the experience was.
That seems like normal this-world Hertz incompetence to me. The best and brightest people do not sign up to stand behind a booth at a car rental agency.
> The best and brightest people do not sign up to stand behind a booth at a car rental agency.
According to the article, the guy behind the counter at Hertz agreed with the author about their insane charter flight policy, and tried to help him fix the situation, but was powerless. The red tape was all above his head and much of the confusion/frustration was on the phone with customer support.
If anything, the "best and brightest" folks in Hertz management who drafted the policies that both the phone assistant and the person behind the counter had to try to navigate (and who both acknowledged the policies they were struggling against were dumb) are the ones who failed big time here, not the every men that GP is insulting.
To be clear though, I doubt that someone in Hertz management sat down and devised this scenario deliberately to save a few bucks, hoping that nobody with social media clout would ever run into it. My guess is that it's the result of a web of misaligned incentives and organizational cruft that resulted in a creaky but mostly-working system that nobody ever fixed.
You can use your imagination to fill in the details for fun - maybe 8 years ago some stressed-out shift manager without enough people to work the rental desk (due to a freak corporate-mandated hiring freeze) got a call asking for updated contact information for his location and he hesitated a moment and the caller, a temp on loan for the day, helpfully suggested that they just leave the extension blank for now, and marked the location done. And over the next 8 years the company was making its numbers and there was no need to rock the boat and dump a bunch of money into management consultants to tear everything up and start over fresh, and the VP of airports just had a grandkid and was letting his lieutenants run things on autopilot, and the CEO was happy as a clam with his 2pm golf games and expensed steak dinners and had no idea that anything was wrong, etc etc etc etc. The WSJ exposé following Hertz's surprise Chapter 11 filing practically writes itself.
I followed this as it unfolded on his Twitter account (https://twitter.com/scalzi). He has a way of taking some small experience or observation and turning it into a great little story or one-liner. He's written some good sci-fi, too.
Also worth checking out: the comment from "toyko uber story" on an insane Black Car Uber ride in Japan (scroll down, it's currently 6th from the bottom).
Only after reading this article and then looking at his bio did I put together that this is the author of the Old Man's War series. I think I made it to the 4th or 5th book in the series and it's an enjoyable read
The other hack is to “pony express” in stages: use Lyft/Uber to get part way or to a mid point, where you are confident you CAN get a rental, a train/bus, or another Lyft/Uber to keep going.
This is especially useful if you can’t find a driver that will take you all the way.
I got in short but very loud argument with an airport taxi driver when I did this to get dropped off just outside the airport taxi zone. The “real” ride was 5x the price at the airport taxi rate vs taking an Uber. The louder the driver got, the more I realized how good of decision it was to get the hell out of his car.
in my experience airport taxi drivers all hate short trips. we used to live near an airport, and taking a taxi home was always a nerve-racking moment in how the driver would take it. usually they were grumpy which made for a frustrating experience.
Often the taxi driver has waited for a long time (sometimes hours) in the airport queue for it to be their turn to get a fare. If you take a $5 ride they’re upset because they invested all that time for no payoff. I don’t think it’s wrong for the passenger to do this, but I understand why it’s frustrating for the driver.
An interesting solution, but I probably would have tried a Penske box truck first. I wouldn't entirely trust a U-Haul to make it the full 300 miles without some kind of a mechanical problem, even when the box is empty except for my suitcase and carry-on.
Moving truck rentals are better set-up to do one-way trips than the airport car rentals. Also, you won't get the airport surcharge. Might be a little more expensive than a car rental or the Lyft, but I guess you could always fill up the truck with Chicagoland-specific goods, if you wanted.
My experience is that jet centers like Signature Flight Services (from the article) employ concierge people with superpowers.
Once as a private pilot of a 4-seater derping above Colorado I needed to divert to Colorado Springs due to a developing thunderstorm and decided to hanger the airplane to not risk hail damage.
Basically you ring an FBO like Signature (in this case Cutter Aviation), book some hangar space, and show up. Same problem though, flights were being cancelled out of Colorado Springs and every hotel and rental car was booked. It took an hour, but concierge arranged for TWO hertz employees to deliver a car from out of town. My rate was $25 with unlimited miles plus a bit extra for the hail damage waiver. I think the hangar was $50 for the night.
What a great story? I always ask Lyft/Uber drivers about interesting stories. One told me how he picked up 3 girls outside of a fancy condo in LA and drove them to Vegas which is about 300 miles and a 5 hr ride. Turns out the girls were drunk and the condo guy had called for a ride to take them home, And they decided they rather go to Vegas to continue the party ;-)
Penn and Teller's "Desert Bus" game simulates a bus drive between LA and Las Vegas.. Debatably the worst video game ever, but now used for charity drives..
There were [0]/are [1] fun twitch uber/lyft livestreams on twitch. They ask the passengers if they are okay with being livestreamed and have text-to-speech commands in chat. Tablet in the car for the passengers to interact with chat if they want to. It's a cool experience, especially with the party crowd.
Yeah, this is exactly how I imagined it. They punch in "Caesar's Palace" then hit "yes", "Accept", and "Charge my stored card" before handing the phone back to the guy.
Then the guy is wondering how in the hell he got a $500 charge from Lyft on his credit card statement at the end of the month.
If you are a single dude partying with 3 hot chicks, you will get them a ticket to the moon if they so desire!
He was probably way too drunk or he just did not care!
Since the driver would have had to dead head back to Chicago, if his expenses were a not unreasonable 0.50 cents per mile, the only profit the driver made was the tip.
If the driver drove 600 miles and his car got 25 miles to the gallon, at $3 a gallon his gas expenses would have only been $72. Of course there are other costs (maintenance, depreciation), but those also exists if you are just driving your car around town, and I think Uber / Lift's whole business model is based on the driver not really taking them into account. If the tip was $100, the driver would have walked away with $330 in cash after the drive - which is not bad for a 10 hour workday.
$0.58 per mile is the standard IRS deduction for business use of a car, meant to fully encompass gas, maintenance, etc., which would suggest a total expected cost of about $348 if you include more than just gas.
Even worse, that deduction is very conservative. Like, 1990 Ford Escort conservative. AFAIK, the business use deduction is almost always more if you list all your expenses on a percent-business basis compared to taking the $.58/mile.
It would but it isn't a great suggestion. If you're trying to optimize costs you can beat that by a huge factor.
$0.58 per mile is about how much it costs to lease a car at $350/month and pay for gas, which is what you would do in an upper middle class job requiring lots of travel.
So if you get a new, fairly nice car every three years and use it exclusively for Lyft, you won't make any money.
If you want to make more money than zero, own your car for longer and do some of the maintenance yourself.
Plus it ends up making it really easy on the driver. Only one passenger to worry about vs driving around the city all day. All the longer Lyfts I've taken, the drivers seem to like them the most. I always feel bad too knowing they'd have to potentially drive back without a fare but I've never had one complain about it.
Also, as the author quotes the driver saying, "I like long trips. This could be fun.".
It's a fun story to tell, probably refreshingly different from a usual day, and it seems like he at least made a decent wage, if not as much as usual. So at worst it's a small one-day paycut for a nice memorable day.
A Lyft specific thing to take into account is that Lyft drivers get a bonus if they hit a certain number of rides per week. One long ride makes it harder to hit that goal.
From talking to Lyft drivers, you can specify where your last ride takes you. I’ve heard of people doing that from Sacremento to SF and back.
Now can you do that from Dayton to Chicago? I’d be interested to know. You could potentially piece a trip back together with a mix of rides and deadheads.
And the experience. He considered it an adventure. Hell, I would drive John Scalzi for free. He's one of my favorite authors. John--if you ever make it out to Oahu, I'll be your personal chauffeur.
Variable expenses on a car you already own are nowhere near $0.50/mile. (The GSA/IRS figure includes apportioned fixed costs, which do not fully apply here, IMO.)
$.50 is already lower than the IRS rate ($.58 this year).
It may be a little conservative, but it's not crazy. You absolutely should be computing TCO of the vehicle and amortizing that if you are driving for a service like Lyft. What fixed costs do you think don't fully apply?
Time based depreciation and registration, insurance, and property/excise tax are all fixed costs that apply whether or not the Lyft driver takes that 300 mile round trip or parks the car that day.
That argument applies to any similar business though, so while I think I get where you are coming from I don't know why you would treat Lyft specially, here.
When considering “I’m being offered $300 for a 600 mile drive; is that more profitable (and by how much) than parking the car and watching TV instead?”, you should consider only those costs that vary with usage rather than those that you’d incur anyway.
When considering “Should I buy a car to drive Lyft?”, you should consider all costs, of course.
Ok, I see where you are coming from, but as far as I can tell for the majority of cases it seems that uber/lyft drivers are effectively running small businesses (notwithstanding the PR efforts to convince people it is "on the side"). So the realistic comparison is what other earning can I do in that time, not "sit on the couch", so the TCO comes in.
The large majority of costs associated with a car are mileage not time. Somewhat less true in northern climates because of winter salt and there are some fixed costs like excise tax and (kinda sorta) insurance but it's mostly variable.
>(which hadn’t, in fact, told him the destination, just that it was more than 30 minutes away)
That's disappointing. There are arguments for both sides of whether it should give the exact location but it ought to at least give the rough number of miles and rough travel time.
I would have not paid Lyft directly, but instead I would have negotiated with the driver (edit: yes, after having paid the initial few dollars to summon one).
I've had multiple drivers give me a business card and ask me to call them when I need a ride and not use the app. I've never taken them up on it, but I assume they can offer a lower rate and still take home more money.
The protection/insurance that kicks in when you get in an accident or the driver decides after fifty miles that fuck it, they don't want to drive any more.
After 10-15 miles I would have said "So Mr. Scalzi, I'm going to need you to tell me what the Perry family is up to. Go ahead, I'll give you a few minutes to contemplate, but then you'd better get to telling me" then I'd have also inquired about the next in the Collapsing Empire series.
Joking aside, I'm curious to see more from the driver. What did you think when you accepted the fare curbside aside from "I like long trips"? Did you stay at the destination for a night or immediately drive back? If you have a partner were they a bit upset? What's it like driving a stranger for 5 hours?
Does Lyft compensate you for the drive back to your home? I'm guessing not? Or do they seriously jack up the price if you go beyond a certain distance to compensate the drive for his almost certainly empty drive back?
You can tell the app where you want to end up after doing a bunch of trips, so the driver could just set his overall endpoint back to O'Hare and Lyft would try to give him rides going that way.
I did the same thing recently when a flight home from a weekend trip was diverted due to weather to an airport 150 miles away. All the rental cars were taken, of course. The next flight out was 8-10 hours away, I was dead tired and had important work obligations coming up. I made sure the Lyft driver knew what I was asking. He phoned his wife to tell her he'd be late getting off his usual shift and off we went. It's certainly not something I'd do often, but I'm glad it was an option then.
As a related aside, I have a friend who frequently takes Uber/Lyft for trips from the CT suburbs to Boston since it often beats flying and the Acela train on both cost and time, especially if he's traveling with family members.
"But since I flew into O’Hare on a commercial flight, like a common schmuck, Hertz wouldn’t give me the car, even though they clearly had it to give. Basically, I wasn’t rich enough to rent the car Hertz had allowed me to reserve, so they weren’t going to let me have it. Which, I don’t know. Seems like a real dick move on Hertz’s part, and doesn’t incline me to use them ever again for anything."
The author's experience with Hertz mirrors my own experiences with them. Much like using UPS, they are an absolute last choice for us. We have a saying in our house: "It's called Hertz because it hurts."
The salty language of these last few comments reminds me of the old FuckedCompany.com website. A guy named "Pud" ran it, and it was great. But I guess he got bored with it.
He'd write about Accenture back in the days. And when he did he'd always say: Accenture (pronounced ass-enter).
Sigh. Apologies in advance if this is drifting too much into Reddit territory.
As for that website redesign, I bet that USA Accenture shipped the actual work off to some third world country, probably India. It seems like standard modus operandi to get stuff back from India that only attempts to meet the bare minimum. E.g. as the article notes, just hardwire Hertz specific stuff, so can't easily deal with sister companies like Dollar and Thrifty.
It's a difficult problem to solve with outsourcing. You'll rarely get any sense of ownership from them. And why would you expect any?
The last three times I’ve had international flights, the puddle jumper connecting flights have been so delayed that I missed the connection. It seems like the big flights rarely get delayed, but God help you if you need to fly from, say DC to Philly (145 miles) or Baltimore to New York (250 miles).
On my next-to-last trip, it took American 13 HOURS to get me from DC to Montreal (450 miles). And they lost my luggage. Literally, I could have taken the bus faster.
It’s gotten so bad that I no longer take the puddle jumper flights. I now book to fly directly out of Dulles or Philly or New York and just drive there, or take Amtrak. It’s both faster and cheaper.
the driver probably made around $200 from this ride which is more than how much he would have made working the whole day, except this time he mostly drove on a highway at steady speeds instead of dealing with 30 short distance rides and 30 different people. everybody wins
I have had far too many of these stories with Hertz. I simply will not use them anymore.
Avis still seems to do right by me, and Avis seems to give their minions enough autonomy to actually fix the customer's problem.
My biggest problem with car rental lately is simply that the cars absolutely suck. No backup cameras, no radars, no adaptive cruise, etc. unless you buy the ultra, turbo premium ones. They are rotating their fleets so slowly now that the cars are becoming way behind the curve.
I have a secondary problem in that they are always trying to fob off the SUV onto me despite the fact that I didn't want anything bigger than mid-size.
Reminds me of something that happened to a friend of mine once. He was booked on the last train from Cologne to Brussels for the day, but missed his connection due to a delay on an earlier train.
Due to EU passenger rights regulations, train company was on the hook to get him there somehow, so they ended up paying a taxi to drive him across the Netherlands into Belgium.
Pro tip: when you request long rides in a ride-share app, give the driver a heads-up about where you're actually going before s/he arrives, so they have the option to cancel the request. They'll appreciate it, and generally won't cancel anyway.
Transportation in north America is more difficult than transportation within Europe for sure. I recently moved to Germany from Canada and have found it is much easier to get between locations with many options and price points available.
He probably should have tried flying to Cincinnati or Columbus... Or taken the bus to Dayton (the blue line would have gotten him straight to the Greyhound station from the airport).
> Turns out it would cost about $330. Which, as it happens, was only a little bit more than what it would have cost for that one-way rental that Hertz wasn’t going to give me even though they had the car.
Couple of years ago there was a professional football player that took an Uber from O'Hare to Buffalo, NY for just under $1000 to make it practice on time.
Anyway, this guy could have taken a Megabus to from Chicago to Cincinnati for $25 and then done a rideshare the rest of the way. It would have been far less expensive.
If making it on time to practice is really important, do you want to depend on a bus?
Bus Being late to pick up or leave isn’t uncommon. I assume if something goes wrong along the way you should be able to get off with your stuff without too much trouble and order a ride.
But if there’s a big traffic jam. And you might be able to save some time taking inside roads or what have you. A bus isn’t going to do that. You also won’t be able to order a ride share if you’re on the highway with traffic packed up.
I think the situation depends on how important making practice is. Sometimes you’re already on thin ice.
> I think the situation depends on how important making practice is.
Just ask Jonas Gray of the Patriots [1].
“On November 16, 2014, Gray rushed for 201 yards, and a franchise-record four touchdowns on 38 carries “
This was such a historic event that he promptly featured the cover of Sports Illustrated [2].
A little bit later he was late for practice. He was essentially benched for the rest of the season. It was also pretty much the end of his career in the NFL.
Haha Jonas Gray is actually the example on the top of my mind! I was worried my post was getting long enough so didn’t add him! It’s really unfortunate. That one game was wild as hell. And ban it’s over because Belichick is such a hard ass.
I think he was talking about the author, not the football player. The football player was going to Buffalo so I assume the bus to Ohio wouldn't be helpful.
Yes, that is what I had meant. I should have been more clear.
I should also point out that if you have to fly through Chicago frequently, you must know that disruptions anywhere in the US can have a ripple effect and cause problems at O'Hare. The airplanes have to come from somewhere first in order to have an outbound flight...
Chicago is a huge Southwest hub, and Southwest flights almost never show up on travel sites. Additionally, the "nearby airports" rarely show Milwaukee or South Bend, both of which can be reached by train from downtown Chicago. The Amtrak Hiawatha stops at MKE (slightly over an hour from downtown), though it's a bit inconvenient to get to the terminals from the train platform. The South Shore railroad (about 2 hours from downtown) stops right at the South Bend terminal, and you are maybe 100 feet from the gates. Both airports have daily nonstops to all the big hubs in the eastern US, such as Newark and Atlanta. If you feel that you are "stuck" in Chicago, dig a little deeper: you probably aren't.
Better to ask forgiveness than permission.