Uber Tries To Charge Girl $16,000 For Ride From Brooklyn To Midtown East

Gothamist – Jaime Hessel’s March 28th UberX ride from her East Williamsburg apartment to East Midtown covered 6.79 miles in 35 minutes and 29 seconds, and resulted in a $12,251.49 bill. In Uber’s defense, East Midtown is lovely this time of year. It was snowing lightly just before noon that morning, and Hessel acknowledged that surge pricing was in effect. Still, she decided to call an UberX, concerned that the train would make her late to Crawl for Cancer, a fundraising pub crawl in the East 50s that was scheduled to start at 1:00 p.m. Hessel told us by phone this morning that her driver seemed distracted from the get-go. “The guy picked me up, and he just sat there for a little bit. Maybe for five minutes or so.” At first, he followed the GPS, and took the correct right turn on to Meeker Avenue. However, he soon started taking phone calls and checking his voicemail, and, according to Hessel, ignoring the directions. “I’m paying attention to his GPS, and I’m very familiar with the area, and I see him go right by McGuinness, and I’m really curious how he’s going to get to 50th Street.” Hessel estimates that the missed turn added an addition seven minutes to the trip. Still, “The driver was fine at that point. He wasn’t even hostile or frustrated.” Things got more hairy on the second approach to McGuinness. Hessel alleges that the driver missed his turn again, and continued straight onto the BQE ramp. She recalled, “He slams on his breaks and he stops in the middle of the ramp, and puts his car in reverse.” According to Hessel’s account, she had to repeatedly urge the driver to get out of reverse and continue in the direction of traffic. The rest of the ride was punctuated with lane cutting, both while exiting the Pulaski Bridge and Midtown Tunnel. By the end of the trip, “The driver was driving in the bus lane to make up for lost time. I had him drop me off a block away from the bar because I didn’t want to be in the car anymore. I felt very unsafe.” Asked why she didn’t get out of the car sooner, Hessel admitted, “I felt stupid because I stuck with it.” Hessel’s initial receipt for the ride was $56.40, which she immediately contested, claiming that the driver had unnecessarily extended the ride. She sent an e-mail to Uber Support, and Uber responded a few days later, on April 3rd. “They were really quick about it, and I was impressed,” she admitted. “They said, ‘We reviewed it, and you’re right. He definitely took extra time that was unnecessary, we’re going to credit your account $15.” Yesterday morning, Hessel still hadn’t received her refund. This is probably due to the fact that the credit card on her account expired on April 1st, and she had yet to update the information.

“I received two e-mails yesterday. One about the status of my credit saying it should be there, it’s been processed. And then a second e-mail saying they are trying to charge me $16,000, but then $4,000 had already been taken care of, so I owed them $12,000. I couldn’t even tell you what this was about, because I checked my credit cards and there was no charge. I e-mailed them numerous times and they kept giving me the runaround. I was furious. I mean, you can’t give me an explanation?”

Fucking Uber man. They walk around like their the NFL. Completely untouchable and shit. Which they are. I mean yea there’s Lyft and all those other bootleg transportation apps but nobody uses that shit. We’re all a bunch of lemmings that just punch in that 3.2x surge rate without even hesitating because its fake Uber money, not real money, right? And we sit there watching their little black Uber car hop around our iPhone screen until some dude named Gods’Prayer calls you because he cant find the pick up spot even though its linked by a goddam global positioning system. And then we get in and ride to wherever we’re getting drunk and in like 4 hours do the same exact thing and repeat the process to get home.

And no matter what the email says about your “Evening Trip With Uber!” you’re still gonna use it. They could charge you $50 after giving you the runaround, the could charge you 16,000. Bottom line is everyone is still gonna use Uber. Thats why when you email their customer service they dont give a fuck. “Hey Jaime we’re trying to give you 15 bucks back, Dunno whats up with that $12,000 though! I’m gonna go now!” Just brushing off whoever and whatever because they know there’s a zillion more dumb, trusting white people who will just get in a random car and overpay out of their asshole all because their iPhone said it was ok.