There was a time gig economy work looked worth exploring as a society, and that ride services such as Lyft and Uber that relied on gig workers were irresistible – they cost less compared with taxis and were easier for anyone with a smartphone. Now gig work feels like grubby capitalist exploitation and the low costs are gone. Driver pay was high and the charge to customers low, and now both are untrue because company subsidies were unsustainable.
Customers can now pay more for a Lyft or Uber than for a taxi, even though taxis also charge for any idle time stuck in traffic. Meanwhile, “Uber and Lyft have steadily taken more of the fare, making it harder and harder for all of us to pay our most basic bills,” driver Pedro Castro said in April on Beacon Hill during a hearing on getting permission to unionize for ride-share drivers.
If it’s time to try taxis again, at least the industry got into the app game. Uber arrived in 2009; it took another six years until brothers and Cambridge taxi drivers Prabhdeep and Paramveer Singh launched Origa, which failed to gain traction, and that Arro launched in New York. (Another taxi app called Curb is available on app stores and better reviewed by customers – yet Arro is the one advertised in taxis.)
Theoretically, Arro makes taking a taxi as easy as taking a Lyft. Instead of finding a car on the street randomly or, fingers crossed, at a known taxi stand or dialing a dispatcher to, fingers crossed again, send one to you, the Arro app shows you a by-now familiar map that shows all possible rides prowling the area. Instead of having to fumble with cash or cards, it lets you pay in-app. All this helped Arro survive and grow to Chicago, San Francisco, Houston, Miami, London and Boston.
The Arro experience
I tried Arro, and there are problems.
My first attempts to use Arro failed – though I could download the app easily enough, it didn’t let me complete the sign-up process. In this interim when I didn’t have Arro but was motivated to take taxis instead of Lyfts, I took one from Logan Airport to my home and got a refresher on another taxi downside: By being less tied to algorithmic efficiency and not obliged to follow app-provided mapping, a taxi will feed paranoia about being ripped off the old-fashioned way. My driver went way to the west and north on a route to Neighborhood 9 in Cambridge from Boston that rejected a route suggested by a computer map, making me wonder if this was just a way to make the ride last longer and cost more.
Whatever the hangup, Arro at least let me finish the signup process. On June 2, I scheduled my first ride, between two locations in Somerville: 115 Sycamore St. to 257 Elm St. That nine-minute trip of 1.6 or so miles would cost around $10.50; so far so good. At my location, I checked the Arro countdown to my ride’s arrival and went about my business.
A few minutes later, figuring my ride would arrive any second, I was shocked to see the Arro app telling me my ride was complete – a $6.32 trip in Boston from North Grove Street to Fruit Street – some three miles away across the Charles River.
I emailed a complaint at around 1:30 p.m. June 4 and got a response less than 24 hours later that a refund had been issued and would get to me within three to five business days.
An explanation, of sorts
But … what happened? “It looks like the driver picked up someone else, and quick metered the ehail to service someone else,” Arro customer service said, an answer that answers nothing.
On Lyft, when your ride is canceled, it says so (though it often also keeps jumping your fare from one driver to the next in a way that is just as unreliable and useless for someone trying to get somewhere without a car of their own). It doesn’t continue to count down the moment until your car is supposed to arrive and then does not, even as your driver drove across a river to pick up someone else, gave them your trip with no obvious justification and charged you for the insult.
As explanations go, “quick metered the ehail to service someone else” is incomprehensible and meaningless, in that it talks about what happened without providing any rationale or assurance the problem won’t recur. This is like waking up from an operation with the same condition and getting a calmly delivered explanation that “It looks like we removed the wrong organ and left a pair of forceps inside.” And your $6.32 is being refunded.
By now we were supposed to be in a world where we could be carless with confidence. But mass transit is more unreliable than ever, Lyft and Uber are tainted and of waning value and the taxi industry may have learned only half-lessons from the trip into redundancy it took from around 2010 until the Covid pandemic ended the apps’ joy ride.
A stronger
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