It’s being called the longest recorded ride in Uber history, and it took place all because some chick in Williamsburg, Virginia wanted to go see her boyfriend.
Instead of booking a round-trip flight, or purchasing an Acela Express train ticket from D.C. to Penn Station, or hopping on a Bolt/Mega Bus, this chick opened up her Uber app and hopped in a car for 8 hours and rode up the Mid-Atlantic seaboard from Williamsburg, VA all the way to Brooklyn.
According to Metro UK the girl passenger, believed to be 19 or 20, got in the car and asked the driver how far they were willing to drive her. The supposed reason the Uber driver decided to take the fare and drive all the way to NYC was they were feeling up for an adventure. After getting into the Uber the passenger slept the entire way, and the driver said that upon reaching Brooklyn the girl didn’t even seem excited to see her boyfriend, she just looked tired.
So was this ‘adventure’ worth it for the driver? Well, when it was all said and done the Uber driver only made $9/hour for $15.5-hours of work, driving there and back, and the girl didn’t even tip. The Uber driver also spent an additional $32 on gas….What kind of asshole takes an 8-hour taxi and doesn’t tip? I don’t feel the need to tip Uber drivers because the fees are baked into their hourly rate, but holy shit, for a trip that long it’s simply unacceptable not to tip.
In total, the trip cost the 19-year-old girl $294.04. For comparison’s sake, I priced out a round-trip Amtrak train ticket for this weekend and it only costs $190, so she could’ve saved over $100 just by taking the train (which has a drink cart again!!!). And flight costs are totally out of whack right now because of the holidays, but if you jump ahead to early January then round-trip flights from Richmond to NYC are only $218 on Kayak.com.
For some reason, the trip took 8 hours. Presumably, traffic was a bitch and they got stuck in traffic in and around NYC because that’s a 6hr drive without traffic, one that I’ve done many times and it’s never taken me 8 hours to drive that leg of I-95.
(h/t Metro UK)