As a novice Uber driver in my spare time I can tell you that the driver can send a message to Uber support after the trip to explain a pick-up or drop-off location that needs to be adjusted. I would imagine this would be confirmed with the rider.

I'm getting ready for my first ride, at SFO; I've found answers to most of what I'm wondering, but it isn't clear to me how we know that the driver has "ended" the trip: that the meter doesn't keep running.

If they aren't swiping the phone by the time I get out of the car, I politely remind them to end the trip. I once had a driver drive half way back across town on my account, requiring a "complaint" adjustment. You will typically get your receipt message within a minute of getting out of the vehicle.

As an Uber driver myself, I have indeed had a few times that I forgot to "begin the trip." I always notice it, though, when I go to "end the trip," and realize that it never started. In my market, that means a basic fare of $5.

However, I do have the ability to log into my account and enter the pickup and dropoff points so that the fare can be adjusted. (Did not know that until after I had driven for awhile!)

I must say it would never occur to me that the passenger would need to be responsible for notifying me of this. That's on me!

Seems a little dramatic, no? Also if something is unethical, then whether or not they make millions has nothing to do with it.

If it's unethical, it's unethical regardless of the financial situation of the driver. That's the whole point of ethics.

I've had this happen with Uber X a couple of times. I sent a request for a fare review and explained the driver forgot to start (or once accidentally ended the trip) and requested that I be charged the correct fare. It seems the right thing to do.

So it wouldn't be unethical nor wrong if they made millions?:confused:

^

I use Uber often (several times / month, occasionally several days in a row or multiple times / day). A few months back I got curious about the fares in another city and realized that a GPS-enabled map of my routes was stored in the account. I looked at a few just to remind myself and realized that the app was registering insane and impossible routes any time my trip included one of the tunnels leaving Manhattan. Imagine a child's crayon scribble in the middle of a Cartesian grid. I simply contacted Uber to insist on correct fares for plausible routes and they did so. On another occasion the driver had some kind of app failure and by the time he got me home he registered a $9 ride when it should have been more like $40; within a few minutes after ride termination I had an updated receipt for the full (estimated) amount.

What gives with the app? The way GPS works on a phone is by pinging three nearby radio towers and triangulating your location based on a conversion of round/trip message acknowledgement time into distance. However, a moving vehicle and in particular one entering a tunnel under a river may only completely acknowledge a round-trip with one or two of the cell towers before it loses the ability to register a "ping" with its GPS. So a trip that should have been a minimum-distance straight line between two points can come off looking like a multi-mile backtrack if the app registers a ping as a confirmed location. That's what happened to me: trips across downtown Manhattan suggested a detour cross-town up and back down from the upper east side. It's a teeny bit more complex than that but not by much. Uber could choose to program their distance route tracker in the app in a way that cleans up (smooths; reconciles with time per segment) these accidental over charges. Given what we know about Uber's business methods I would guess that they make a conscious decision not to do so. In fact, if the GPS failure explanation holds I am so certain there was nearer cell tower density in my several cases that it's only possible they programmed the app with functionality that conveniently produces or at minimum allows easily ignored, aw-shucks type errors that favor billing but not customers.

In OP's case, the middle of the highway pickup sounds more like a missing third ping although SEA and SFO aren't exactly cell tower deserts. That's a head scratcher without more detail because GPS is military-grade reliable above ground. As to contacting them, I would apply a proportionality test where if you think you're denying a guy $10-20 from his honest day's work, it's probably worth a note and good karma to correct. For $2, doubtful. Everyone will have their own threshold but your time is worth something and paying twice for a ride (second time to correct the app's failure -- at least as likely as human failure, what others have suggested) is problematic at best.

I don't think that's right. I was under the impression that most modern smartphones (including the iPhones that Uber hands out to its drivers) have an actual GPS chip in them and use a combination of satellite GPS signals, cell tower triangulation, and wifi access point triangulation to determine your location at any given moment. So yes, there are plenty of situations where the phone gets its location wrong, but it's not all about cell towers.

In dense urban environments like Manhattan, my phone's location is frequently off a bit. But I use Uber, Lyft and Gett in Manhattan extensively and almost always look at the receipt, and have never noticed a GPS routing error. I have a friend who has had a couple of Uber routing errors where the map indicated him floating through the Hudson or taking a sudden 1 minute detour 40 blocks north, but it's pretty rare for that to happen, so I'm pretty sure they do have some sort of smoothing software in place to get the routes right.

I once had an Uber driver "forget" to end the trip and charged me for an entire round-trip. He picked me up downtown, dropped me off at my house 15 miles away and then returned downtown to pick up more people I assume. A quick email to Uber solved it.

Many late-model phones have GPS receivers and the full arbitration functionality you describe can be enabled, but if your phone (or a driver's) were constantly arbitrating between a GPS sat signal, wifi, and cell towers to determine location, it would be unpleasantly hot all the time and the battery would run down a full charge in a matter of hours.

I believe you have never noticed an egregious routing error but "it never happened to me" or "I rarely hear about it" != "rare". I seriously doubt the vast majority of Uber users critically analyze the trip log map considering what's at stake is a few bucks, maybe $10-20 of fare correction. I only happened upon it accidentally.

As to smoothing software, hyper growth tech firms who do all their customer service online don't really have an incentive to mobilize their engineers to develop "smoothing techniques" that advantage affluent customers paying a premium for convenience. Uber in particular doesn't come off as the sort of company to deprioritize its pipeline of core functionality to smooth out my routes and reduce their billing.

That's the way cellsite-based location works, but modern phones also use GPS (and GLONASS, in many cases), along with the signal strength of known WiFi hotspots, to determine location.

I would be very surprised if there was a single phone sold in the US in the last three years that (a) doesn't have a GPS receiver, and (b) can be used with Uber (i.e. is a smartphone). GPS receivers are essentially ubiquitous in all but low-end flip-phones.

Phones generally use A-GPS, which stands for Assisted GPS. The phone uses its GPS chip to determine your location, but takes a while to lock on to your actual location. Your phone will use the cell towers to assist in locking onto your location (otherwise, it would take about 10 minutes to lock onto you with GPS alone. Anyone with a car GPS knows this "delay" well!). If you have an iPhone (not sure if Android phones do this as well), it will also use wifi (if on) to determine your location. I used to have a second generation iPod Touch (no GPS, no cell service) that I was able to navigate with. It was almost spot on in finding my location on wifi alone.

I was just charged $4 for a trip from Condesa in Mexico City out to the airport. Seemed way to cheap so I sent a message to Uber. They said it was correct but then charged me another $8.

If my driver would forget to begin the trip I would not say anything because It's the drivers task to start the trip.