^

It's like expecting to go to Olive Garden and asking the waiter to elaborate which wine should be paired with their never ending pasta bowl and then complaining to management their wine suggestion was awful. LOL.

Excluding NYC, majority of Uber drivers I've met are moonlighting. Comparing Uber drivers with "volunteer fire and police" are not even apples to apples. The later have training requirements. Uber requires only a driver's license and the remaining requirements (eg cars younger than certain model year, insurance etc) are not skills. There's basically no training.

"Performing well" does not include knowing the ins and outs of the cities they operate in. That's why the Uber app integrates with Google Maps GPS. The driver does not even need to copy/paste the pickup/drop-off address from the Uber app to Google Maps. It's all done seamlessly when they accept the pickup and start the trip. As you wrote yourself, "uber is one of the lowest skill jobs and the barriers to entry are pretty low." The barriers are so low that I don't see why you are expecting the drivers to know how to navigate the city. Chances are they are visiting parts of their city for the very first time.

IMO Uber's response back to HT is perfectly reasonable. Fare adjusted to what it should have been - $6.46 for UberX

Asking that the UberX driver be fired is not reasonable. If the expectation is that you MUST get a qualified driver who SHOULD know Boston's best routes in and around the city then order accordingly (such as UberBlack).

Uber's star rating system for drivers ensures that they don't get penalized by a small number of unreasonable customers as long as the majority of their other customers are happy (rating the driver 4 or 5 stars consistently).

I had an UberX driver in Toronto take me from the Intercontinental to the airport and insisted that Uber requires him to follow his map when I asked him why he was not taking the exit for terminals. His phone map ended up in a cul de sac by a fence next to a runway. Needless to say he then backtracked and dropped me off at my terminal curbside per my original request. Not an Uber FAIL experience so much as an Uber UNCOMFORTABLE experience - why won't the driver use some common sense? Generally someone heading to the airport will want to get on their flights via the terminals not the tarmac . He was a new immigrant to Canada (from Jamaica if it makes any difference) that was getting to know his new hometown. He was friendly and chatty at 4am in the morning (while I was in sleep stupor) so I still gave him 3 stars for being nice and apologizing as he dropped me off.

An email to Uber asking for a fare adjustment and a recommendation that the driver be given a little customer sensitivity training is all that I thought was needed in this case. Beyond that the star rating will take care of him (ie: fired) if he consistently is rated less than 4 stars.

ROLF Ditto