Uber.gov

It’s Time to Let the Government Drive

Flying to Vegas? Look to your left. Now look to your right. Statistically speaking, one of you is about to get ripped off by a cabbie. And it’ll probably be you, the imbecile who chose the middle seat and paid $15 for wifi.

Taxi scams are nothing new, but here’s something novel: The Nevada state government is out-innovating Uber in attacking these scofflaws.

How The “Sin City Shuffle” Works

There are two main routes to get from the Vegas airport to the Strip. One of them is illegal. To figure out which one you’re on, apply this test: Look outside. If you can’t find outside, you’re in a tunnel—which means you’re being ripped off.

The I-215 tunnel adds about $10 to your fare, but one in three cabbies “longhauled” undercover cops through it anyway. The country hasn’t seen this kind of brazenness since Bankerty Robberson opened a Skimask Hut outside Wells Fargo in 1979.

What can possibly be done about such a confounding crime? I had plenty of time to research this on a recent trip to Vegas, while my own cabbie, Mickey, drove me to the Bellagio by way of Montpelier, Vermont.

Uber’s Naive Solution

Uber’s absurd answer to longhauling is straight from your childhood: When a driver behaves badly, he only gets one star. Within hours, Uber adjusts your fare. Their systems can do this automatically because they have everything they need to calculate an “ideal” fare—start point, end point, traffic conditions, and past fares. If the driver keeps scamming others, he automatically gets fired.

But Nevada officials found fault in Uber’s stars. In fact, they kicked the company out of town for not protecting tourists.

I stand with Nevada and say—leave this to the pros.

Here’s the alternate five-point plan that Nevada’s Taxicab Authority devised after 45 years of experience regulating 26 million Vegas taxi rides. We begin in earnest with

Plan A: People with Guns

In June 2012, Nevada launched its first major broadside against longhauling in the form of a roadside checkpoint. Uniformed cops stopped occupied cabs at random and offered to prosecute drivers who were taking inefficient routes.

In other words: Welcome to Vegas! We are slowing you down to make sure your driver isn’t slowing you down.

Unfortunately, through no fault of the state, it didn’t work. It turns out that uber lazy tourists were too apathetic to show up in Clark County District Court during their Vegas vacation:

The authority’s chief investigator, Ruben Aquino, said only about three passengers chose to press complaints out of the 80 cabs that were stopped on Thursday. “People were not willing to prosecute over a couple of dollars,” he said. “They just wanted to get to their hotels.”

So, while Mickey gave me a tour of Mount Rushmore, I researched Nevada’s

Plan B: The Big-Ass Physical Sign (BAPS)

The Nevada Taxicab Authority constructed BAPS throughout McCarran International Airport. Each sign lays out state law and enumerates the proper taxi fares for every conceivable trip a tourist might take, using approximately twice as many words as it took Ronald Reagan to tear down the Berlin Wall.

I knew that Uber was coded largely in Python and Objective-C, so I was curious to see which technologies the Authority selected for the BAPS program.

After extensive research, I can report that the signs are big sheets of paper glued to foam.