SUFFERING ’POOLS
Smelly food, makeout sessions, puking drunks – hell is other riders in NYC’s car-sharing services
As a comedian and waitress who works late hours, Sydnee Washington, 29, uses apps such as Uber and Lyft up to five times a week to commute from Manhattan to her Bushwick apartment.
But because a one-way ride home via Uber can cost her $40, Washington often chooses UberPool or Lyft Line, which pair her with other passengers who are going in similar directions. She also saves up to 50 percent on the fare.
But late-night carpooling can mean sharing a back seat with belligerent, intoxicated passengers.
One of her worst encounters was on a recent Saturday night, when her driver picked up an extremely drunk guy in Murray Hill. The car braked at a stoplight, and he projectile-vomited onto the back of the driver’s seat.
“My driver started sobbing, and he had to pull over to a gas station to clean up that drunk clown,” Washington said. “When we dropped him off, he stumbled out of the car, then fell. He was a mess.”
The hell of carpooling is increasingly a fact of life for New Yorkers as the popularity of rideshares grows. Lyft launched its carpool service, Lyft Line, in 2013. Uber followed with UberPool in 2015, and a recent update to the app has increased the pressure on users to choose a shared car over a more expensive private option. Via, a car service that only offers pooling, has been around since 2013.
Uber driver Harry Campbell estimated that Pool has grown by 50 percent in the past year.
“For passengers, these days it seems like Pool is their default option because of cost savings,” said Campbell, who runs the blog The Rideshare Guy.
But as the trend increases, so do the nightmare stories.
On a Sunday evening a few weeks back, Olga Elliot, 27, an actress based in Ridgewood, shared a van with an inebriated couple who were touching each other’s nether regions while slurring the word “sombrero” repeatedly. “It was so bizarre,” Elliot said. Marie Faustin, 26, an actress from Prospect Heights, recently shared a car with a couple who were eating shawarma loaded with garlicky white sauce.
“I literally spent the entire ride gagging,” she said.
Alix Anfang, an Uber representative, said the company “has clear community guidelines stating passengers are expected to exercise good judgment and behave decently . . . or they could lose access to our service.”
But Campbell pointed out that there’s little riders can do to punish the offenders, since “pool passengers can’t rate each other” in the same way that riders rate drivers and vice versa.
The services have also made locals late to important appointments. Sam, a 30-year-old entrepreneur, was 30 minutes tardy to a business meeting in Midtown after using Via. The app told her that she would arrive 10 minutes before her appointment, but her driver picked up two more passengers and then got stuck in traffic.
“I’ll never use [Via] again,” said Sam, who declined to give her last name, citing work reasons.
Drivers hate carpooling just as much as riders.
“There’s pressure from Uber on drivers to opt in, but drivers don’t like it because they believe they don’t make enough money,” said Bruce Schaller, a former deputy commissioner at the city Department of Transportation. “Secondly, there’s more of a likelihood of conflict [with] multiple passengers.” But some say they’ll keep pooling. UberPool regular Washington said, “You won’t stop taking the train just because a homeless guy pees on it.”