This is a fun story—but he should've just booked a round-trip rental car, and dropped it off in Dayton anyway. I've done this a bunch of times, and all they'll do is charge you the one-way rate and grumble a bit...
What's the benefit in lying to them about your intentions? Is it just because nobody wants to rent you a car one way in the first place?
My (very limited and probably outdated) understanding of the rental car industry is that the locations are franchises and the cars are owned by the franchise. If you rent a car round trip and leave it in some other city they have to deal with getting it back.
Once I rented a car in Seattle one way to Vancouver. Apparently there is some shitburg nobody has ever heard of called Vancouver, WA but I was going to the more famous Canadian city. The flunkie at the counter booked the domestic trip and I drove to the proper Vancouver. When I got there they tried to charge me over $8000 in fees. I think there is no practical upper bound to what they'll try to charge you for such things.
This is why we need a train system with funding parity to the highway and airport systems. There should be trains leaving constantly, at most every 10 minutes, from Chicago to the east, and frequent, semihourly, trains between neighboring cities along the way.
Even if the author could rent a car, having to drive 300 miles is astounding waste of time and mental energy.
There are 5 different Greyhound buses next Monday from Chicago to Dayton (called "Dayton Trotwood"), ranging from $36 to $90, all taking about 7 hours. There are some passenger trains in the US—I've actually gone overnight from Rochester, NY, to Milwaukee, WI, via train when a flight was canceled—but bus travel is just how you get to medium-sized US cities, for better or for worse. 188 US cities are larger than Dayton, and it's only the 6th largest city in Ohio.
Of course, it's not as nice as having regular, smooth, fast trains. But the situation is not as dire as people make it out to be.
I can’t imagine a train leaving every 10 minutes could ever be cost effective. There just aren’t that many people who want to do that trip (8 hours?) when you could do it in 2 hours by plane.
No, the train system should be reorganized. Having multiple stops slows down travel. If Amtrak used shorter trains with a direct route, and all freight trains yielded to passenger trains, people will use more trains.
Otherwise any train trip that takes over eight hours is unpalatable, no matter how bad airport security becomes.
There is nothing, except Chicago’s suburbs, within about 300 miles of Chicago in every direction.
Also, our train system has more than funding parity with roads. Road spending is about $175 billion per year, about half of which isn’t recovered from use fees, for 5 trillion passenger miles. That’s about $0.02 per mile subsidy. Amtrak’s capital expenditures is about $900 million per year, which comes directly from Congress. (Ticket revenue only goes to operating costs.) that’s about $0.13 per passenger mile.
For a guy driving 300 miles, that cost the government $6.00 in road construction and maintenance. For the guy to train that same distance costs the government $39.
The utter inability to get a one-way rental is quite obnoxious. Also the bit about how he was able to reserve a car, but he wasn't a charter flight. Hertz's utter incompetence on the phone was striking as well from some sort of bizarro catch-22 world.
This doesn't make any sense. When I reserve a rental car at Signature or any other FBO, I may or may not give my tail number, but I'm pretty sure that no one has ever checked. I could have arrived in the front door and rented the car. (No one does this, because the cars are more expensive rented this way than from a typical rental desk as the FBO takes a cut and sometimes the airport adds a cut as well.)
This sounds like Hertz just blew it or Signature didn't want to rent a car one-way to this guy and fobbed it off on Hertz.
[0] - FBO -> Fixed Base Operator, basically a service station for private aircraft (whether charters or not; most are not).
The entire rental car experience is ridiculously complicated and inefficient. Look at the difference in renting a Zipcar (owned by Avis) and a regular rental car company. With Zipcar I can reserve a car in minutes, pick up the car I actually reserved without waiting in line or even going into an office, get charged the amount I was quoted and not find out it's twice the cost from some hidden fees and taxes.
That seems like normal this-world Hertz incompetence to me. The best and brightest people do not sign up to stand behind a booth at a car rental agency.
I followed this as it unfolded on his Twitter account (https://twitter.com/scalzi). He has a way of taking some small experience or observation and turning it into a great little story or one-liner. He's written some good sci-fi, too.
The other hack is to “pony express” in stages: use Lyft/Uber to get part way or to a mid point, where you are confident you CAN get a rental, a train/bus, or another Lyft/Uber to keep going.
This is especially useful if you can’t find a driver that will take you all the way.
I got in short but very loud argument with an airport taxi driver when I did this to get dropped off just outside the airport taxi zone. The “real” ride was 5x the price at the airport taxi rate vs taking an Uber. The louder the driver got, the more I realized how good of decision it was to get the hell out of his car.
An interesting solution, but I probably would have tried a Penske box truck first. I wouldn't entirely trust a U-Haul to make it the full 300 miles without some kind of a mechanical problem, even when the box is empty except for my suitcase and carry-on.
Moving truck rentals are better set-up to do one-way trips than the airport car rentals. Also, you won't get the airport surcharge. Might be a little more expensive than a car rental or the Lyft, but I guess you could always fill up the truck with Chicagoland-specific goods, if you wanted.
My experience is that jet centers like Signature Flight Services (from the article) employ concierge people with superpowers.
Once as a private pilot of a 4-seater derping above Colorado I needed to divert to Colorado Springs due to a developing thunderstorm and decided to hanger the airplane to not risk hail damage.
Basically you ring an FBO like Signature (in this case Cutter Aviation), book some hangar space, and show up. Same problem though, flights were being cancelled out of Colorado Springs and every hotel and rental car was booked. It took an hour, but concierge arranged for TWO hertz employees to deliver a car from out of town. My rate was $25 with unlimited miles plus a bit extra for the hail damage waiver. I think the hangar was $50 for the night.
What a great story? I always ask Lyft/Uber drivers about interesting stories. One told me how he picked up 3 girls outside of a fancy condo in LA and drove them to Vegas which is about 300 miles and a 5 hr ride. Turns out the girls were drunk and the condo guy had called for a ride to take them home, And they decided they rather go to Vegas to continue the party ;-)
Penn and Teller's "Desert Bus" game simulates a bus drive between LA and Las Vegas.. Debatably the worst video game ever, but now used for charity drives..
There were [0]/are [1] fun twitch uber/lyft livestreams on twitch. They ask the passengers if they are okay with being livestreamed and have text-to-speech commands in chat. Tablet in the car for the passengers to interact with chat if they want to. It's a cool experience, especially with the party crowd.
Since the driver would have had to dead head back to Chicago, if his expenses were a not unreasonable 0.50 cents per mile, the only profit the driver made was the tip.
If the driver drove 600 miles and his car got 25 miles to the gallon, at $3 a gallon his gas expenses would have only been $72. Of course there are other costs (maintenance, depreciation), but those also exists if you are just driving your car around town, and I think Uber / Lift's whole business model is based on the driver not really taking them into account. If the tip was $100, the driver would have walked away with $330 in cash after the drive - which is not bad for a 10 hour workday.
From talking to Lyft drivers, you can specify where your last ride takes you. I’ve heard of people doing that from Sacremento to SF and back.
Now can you do that from Dayton to Chicago? I’d be interested to know. You could potentially piece a trip back together with a mix of rides and deadheads.
And the experience. He considered it an adventure. Hell, I would drive John Scalzi for free. He's one of my favorite authors. John--if you ever make it out to Oahu, I'll be your personal chauffeur.
Variable expenses on a car you already own are nowhere near $0.50/mile. (The GSA/IRS figure includes apportioned fixed costs, which do not fully apply here, IMO.)
>(which hadn’t, in fact, told him the destination, just that it was more than 30 minutes away)
That's disappointing. There are arguments for both sides of whether it should give the exact location but it ought to at least give the rough number of miles and rough travel time.
I would have not paid Lyft directly, but instead I would have negotiated with the driver (edit: yes, after having paid the initial few dollars to summon one).
I've had multiple drivers give me a business card and ask me to call them when I need a ride and not use the app. I've never taken them up on it, but I assume they can offer a lower rate and still take home more money.
After 10-15 miles I would have said "So Mr. Scalzi, I'm going to need you to tell me what the Perry family is up to. Go ahead, I'll give you a few minutes to contemplate, but then you'd better get to telling me" then I'd have also inquired about the next in the Collapsing Empire series.
Joking aside, I'm curious to see more from the driver. What did you think when you accepted the fare curbside aside from "I like long trips"? Did you stay at the destination for a night or immediately drive back? If you have a partner were they a bit upset? What's it like driving a stranger for 5 hours?
Does Lyft compensate you for the drive back to your home? I'm guessing not? Or do they seriously jack up the price if you go beyond a certain distance to compensate the drive for his almost certainly empty drive back?
I did the same thing recently when a flight home from a weekend trip was diverted due to weather to an airport 150 miles away. All the rental cars were taken, of course. The next flight out was 8-10 hours away, I was dead tired and had important work obligations coming up. I made sure the Lyft driver knew what I was asking. He phoned his wife to tell her he'd be late getting off his usual shift and off we went. It's certainly not something I'd do often, but I'm glad it was an option then.
As a related aside, I have a friend who frequently takes Uber/Lyft for trips from the CT suburbs to Boston since it often beats flying and the Acela train on both cost and time, especially if he's traveling with family members.
"But since I flew into O’Hare on a commercial flight, like a common schmuck, Hertz wouldn’t give me the car, even though they clearly had it to give. Basically, I wasn’t rich enough to rent the car Hertz had allowed me to reserve, so they weren’t going to let me have it. Which, I don’t know. Seems like a real dick move on Hertz’s part, and doesn’t incline me to use them ever again for anything."
The author's experience with Hertz mirrors my own experiences with them. Much like using UPS, they are an absolute last choice for us. We have a saying in our house: "It's called Hertz because it hurts."
The last three times I’ve had international flights, the puddle jumper connecting flights have been so delayed that I missed the connection. It seems like the big flights rarely get delayed, but God help you if you need to fly from, say DC to Philly (145 miles) or Baltimore to New York (250 miles).
On my next-to-last trip, it took American 13 HOURS to get me from DC to Montreal (450 miles). And they lost my luggage. Literally, I could have taken the bus faster.
It’s gotten so bad that I no longer take the puddle jumper flights. I now book to fly directly out of Dulles or Philly or New York and just drive there, or take Amtrak. It’s both faster and cheaper.
the driver probably made around $200 from this ride which is more than how much he would have made working the whole day, except this time he mostly drove on a highway at steady speeds instead of dealing with 30 short distance rides and 30 different people. everybody wins
I have had far too many of these stories with Hertz. I simply will not use them anymore.
Avis still seems to do right by me, and Avis seems to give their minions enough autonomy to actually fix the customer's problem.
My biggest problem with car rental lately is simply that the cars absolutely suck. No backup cameras, no radars, no adaptive cruise, etc. unless you buy the ultra, turbo premium ones. They are rotating their fleets so slowly now that the cars are becoming way behind the curve.
I have a secondary problem in that they are always trying to fob off the SUV onto me despite the fact that I didn't want anything bigger than mid-size.
Reminds me of something that happened to a friend of mine once. He was booked on the last train from Cologne to Brussels for the day, but missed his connection due to a delay on an earlier train.
Due to EU passenger rights regulations, train company was on the hook to get him there somehow, so they ended up paying a taxi to drive him across the Netherlands into Belgium.
Pro tip: when you request long rides in a ride-share app, give the driver a heads-up about where you're actually going before s/he arrives, so they have the option to cancel the request. They'll appreciate it, and generally won't cancel anyway.
[+] [-] envy2|6 years ago|reply
Better to ask forgiveness than permission.
[+] [-] tyrust|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mulmen|6 years ago|reply
My (very limited and probably outdated) understanding of the rental car industry is that the locations are franchises and the cars are owned by the franchise. If you rent a car round trip and leave it in some other city they have to deal with getting it back.
[+] [-] awinder|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] learnfromstory|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] khrbrt|6 years ago|reply
Even if the author could rent a car, having to drive 300 miles is astounding waste of time and mental energy.
[+] [-] BrandonM|6 years ago|reply
Of course, it's not as nice as having regular, smooth, fast trains. But the situation is not as dire as people make it out to be.
[+] [-] refurb|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] f5thesystem|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryacko|6 years ago|reply
Otherwise any train trip that takes over eight hours is unpalatable, no matter how bad airport security becomes.
[+] [-] bluedino|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matz1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|6 years ago|reply
Also, our train system has more than funding parity with roads. Road spending is about $175 billion per year, about half of which isn’t recovered from use fees, for 5 trillion passenger miles. That’s about $0.02 per mile subsidy. Amtrak’s capital expenditures is about $900 million per year, which comes directly from Congress. (Ticket revenue only goes to operating costs.) that’s about $0.13 per passenger mile.
For a guy driving 300 miles, that cost the government $6.00 in road construction and maintenance. For the guy to train that same distance costs the government $39.
[+] [-] kevin_b_er|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sokoloff|6 years ago|reply
This sounds like Hertz just blew it or Signature didn't want to rent a car one-way to this guy and fobbed it off on Hertz.
[0] - FBO -> Fixed Base Operator, basically a service station for private aircraft (whether charters or not; most are not).
[+] [-] lancesells|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jandrese|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilamont|6 years ago|reply
Worth following.
[+] [-] payne92|6 years ago|reply
This is especially useful if you can’t find a driver that will take you all the way.
[+] [-] koolba|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icebraining|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] logfromblammo|6 years ago|reply
Moving truck rentals are better set-up to do one-way trips than the airport car rentals. Also, you won't get the airport surcharge. Might be a little more expensive than a car rental or the Lyft, but I guess you could always fill up the truck with Chicagoland-specific goods, if you wanted.
[+] [-] 0xfaded|6 years ago|reply
Once as a private pilot of a 4-seater derping above Colorado I needed to divert to Colorado Springs due to a developing thunderstorm and decided to hanger the airplane to not risk hail damage.
Basically you ring an FBO like Signature (in this case Cutter Aviation), book some hangar space, and show up. Same problem though, flights were being cancelled out of Colorado Springs and every hotel and rental car was booked. It took an hour, but concierge arranged for TWO hertz employees to deliver a car from out of town. My rate was $25 with unlimited miles plus a bit extra for the hail damage waiver. I think the hangar was $50 for the night.
[+] [-] sharadov|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acomjean|6 years ago|reply
Penn and Teller's "Desert Bus" game simulates a bus drive between LA and Las Vegas.. Debatably the worst video game ever, but now used for charity drives..
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/desert-b...
[+] [-] Semaphor|6 years ago|reply
[0]: https://www.twitch.tv/cinnabarcorp [1]: https://www.twitch.tv/b3ck
[+] [-] umeshunni|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] syntheticnature|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gregkerzhner|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] refurb|6 years ago|reply
Now can you do that from Dayton to Chicago? I’d be interested to know. You could potentially piece a trip back together with a mix of rides and deadheads.
[+] [-] Zanni|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedino|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sokoloff|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Causality1|6 years ago|reply
That's disappointing. There are arguments for both sides of whether it should give the exact location but it ought to at least give the rough number of miles and rough travel time.
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jumbopapa|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lanewinfield|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanmercer|6 years ago|reply
- Wish I drove for Lyft
- Lived in Chicago
- Had gotten him as a passenger
After 10-15 miles I would have said "So Mr. Scalzi, I'm going to need you to tell me what the Perry family is up to. Go ahead, I'll give you a few minutes to contemplate, but then you'd better get to telling me" then I'd have also inquired about the next in the Collapsing Empire series.
Joking aside, I'm curious to see more from the driver. What did you think when you accepted the fare curbside aside from "I like long trips"? Did you stay at the destination for a night or immediately drive back? If you have a partner were they a bit upset? What's it like driving a stranger for 5 hours?
[+] [-] jandrese|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ssully|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dhd415|6 years ago|reply
As a related aside, I have a friend who frequently takes Uber/Lyft for trips from the CT suburbs to Boston since it often beats flying and the Acela train on both cost and time, especially if he's traveling with family members.
[+] [-] bb101|6 years ago|reply
The author's experience with Hertz mirrors my own experiences with them. Much like using UPS, they are an absolute last choice for us. We have a saying in our house: "It's called Hertz because it hurts."
[+] [-] GlenTheMachine|6 years ago|reply
The last three times I’ve had international flights, the puddle jumper connecting flights have been so delayed that I missed the connection. It seems like the big flights rarely get delayed, but God help you if you need to fly from, say DC to Philly (145 miles) or Baltimore to New York (250 miles).
On my next-to-last trip, it took American 13 HOURS to get me from DC to Montreal (450 miles). And they lost my luggage. Literally, I could have taken the bus faster.
It’s gotten so bad that I no longer take the puddle jumper flights. I now book to fly directly out of Dulles or Philly or New York and just drive there, or take Amtrak. It’s both faster and cheaper.
[+] [-] nchuhoai|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YeahSureWhyNot|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsder|6 years ago|reply
Avis still seems to do right by me, and Avis seems to give their minions enough autonomy to actually fix the customer's problem.
My biggest problem with car rental lately is simply that the cars absolutely suck. No backup cameras, no radars, no adaptive cruise, etc. unless you buy the ultra, turbo premium ones. They are rotating their fleets so slowly now that the cars are becoming way behind the curve.
I have a secondary problem in that they are always trying to fob off the SUV onto me despite the fact that I didn't want anything bigger than mid-size.
[+] [-] lutoma|6 years ago|reply
Due to EU passenger rights regulations, train company was on the hook to get him there somehow, so they ended up paying a taxi to drive him across the Netherlands into Belgium.
[+] [-] d_burfoot|6 years ago|reply