Upfront fares are what separates rideshare from taxis

Some ≠ All: some lobby group of rideshare drivers are salty about upfront pricing and decide to stage a protest in Australia

The RideShare Drivers United (RSDU) don’t seem to realize that upfront pricing is the one thing that separates rideshare from taxis.  If companies like Uber and Lyft were to eliminate upfront pricing and price based on time and distance, they are literally, becoming cabs, except minus the obnoxious orange or yellow color of vehicle.

One of RSDU’s demands is that the ridesharing company stop using upfront pricing, and return to a system where drivers are paid for the actual time and distance traveled.

Yeah no, that’s probably not going to happen.

I understand their frustration, because I can’t help but feel bad for a driver I’ve hailed who gets completely stuck in stand-still traffic for 20 minutes, but are only going to make $24, because that’s what the app said they would make, but that’s the reason why I took them instead of hailing a cab or some other alternative mode of transportation.

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A challenger appears

A different kind of fireball on the roadways: in a collision between tractor-trailers, one empties hundreds of mini-bottles of Fireball cinnamon whisky all over Interstate 40 in Arkansas

Normally I do my best to no-sell whenever somewhere outside of Georgia gets some sort of epic truck accident that results in a tragic amount of food all over the roadways, crippling traffic for hours, while crews have to work diligently and expediently to clear the road of random food and/or debris.  Often times, I’m envious whenever something particularly interesting is dumped out all over the place, and wish it happened in like Covington or Forest Park just outside of Atlanta.

However, in this case, aside from the most basic of white girl wasted cocktails most certainly catching my attention, it’s revealed that Arkansas has had its over veritable buffet dumped all over the highways over the last few years, possibly rivaling the sheer volume of wasted food done in Georgia.

Whereas Georgia has had a slightly more balanced menu scattered all over the roads with hams, chickens, cows, potato chips and numerous beer truck spills, Arkansas seems to go more for the college dorm diet, spilling frozen pizzas, and a whole lot of liquor all over their roads.  Allegedly there have been wrecks starring bourbon, gin and now Fireball cinnamon whisky stinking up the asphalt throughout the years.

Lord only knows how fragrant it might be at first, but as my brother points out, a little bit of sun and a little bit of heat, and I-40 in Central Arkansas is going to smell like unadulterated vomit not before long.

Either way, the magic is in the details, and a truck spilling whisky isn’t that much of a deal to me.  But a truck spilling hundreds of airplane-sized bottles of Fireball is kind of a tragedy, because god damn, does a Fireball-Dr. Pepper cocktail really taste delicious, regardless of how much of a basic white girl that would make me to admit to enjoying.

FREE BEEF

Haven’t done one of these in a while: tractor-trailer hauling live cattle overturns on Interstate 75 in Cobb County, Georgia, liberating several cows that systematically mangled the morning rush to levels worse than usual, until they were corralled and moved to onto the side of the road.  Seven cows did not survive the wreck. 😞

Now I don’t really take lightly the unfortunate deaths of animals, but considering what cows are typically raised for, I think it’s safe to assume that FREE BEEF has just been added to the menu of the buffet spilled across the highways of Georgia.  And frankly considering the typically inhumane ways that animals are put out of their misery before they become food for us mostly worthless humans, dying in a car accident might not be the worst way to go for the bovines lucky enough to escape their eventual destinies.

As I said, it’s been a while, so I don’t even know where to begin searching out my last list of food lost on Georgia roads.  All I can really point out that with fresh beef finally entering the fray, joining chickens and hams, the only meat that has yet to represent on a highway is like some salmon, catfish or some other form of seafood.

But if that day ever comes, then Georgia roads can be the Arby’s of the United States highway system, since they’ll have had, all the meats.

When in doubt, change the name, make logos

That’s the Atlanta way.  Or rather, announce news that declares some grand unification of transportation agencies in order to mask that some other umbrella-shell company is being created that will pay off a whole lot of new people for doing jack shit.

Fresh on the heels of my last post where Google put a spotlight on the unintentionally-official meaning of MARTA comes this news that Georgia is going to create a regional transit governing system that will oversee the mass transit authorities across the entire Metro Atlanta area; including MARTA.  The solution?  A new name!

The Atlantaregion Transit Linkauthority, or The ATL!  And they invented new words in the process because they don’t know how acronyms work!

In other words, the goal on paper is that supposedly by 2023, all buses, from Cobb’s CobbLink, Gwinnett’s GRTA, MARTA, and any other regional buses in Clayton or DeKalb will all be re-branded ATL buses.  All MARTA trains will be re-branded ATL trains.  The ATL transportation options will hopefully be consolidated under one brand and identity, with the theory that it will supposedly actually help boost economic viability.

What’s actually going to happen is that by 2019, the teats of all these regional transit authority will be milked by a few people who came up with this brilliant idea, they’ll make a lot of money, by 2021, The ARTLA will be all but forgotten 2022, Cobb and Gwinnett will still be afraid of black people and oppose the rebranding of their buses and in 2023, MARTA will still be MARTA, GRTA will still be GRTA, Cobb will still be vehemently opposed to black people, and Google will still spit out Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta in their queries for the meaning of MARTA.

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Too distracted to enforce the distracted

Georgia Senate approves House Bill 673*, outlawing motorists from holding their cell phones while operating a vehicle AKA the stop fucking texting while driving bill.

*behind paywall, but just hit the stop loading button before the paywall script popup has a chance to load to read content anyway because fuck myAJC

That’s great and all, but it’s going to be completely meaningless when no cop in the state is going to bother enforcing this law.  Unless they’re extremely bored and want to do work to pass the time and/or they’re targeting minorities.  One of my best friends works in law enforcement, and every time I have questions about “is X illegal?” the answers are almost always yes, but with a disclaimer that it’s basically discretionary on the officer to whether or not it’s worth the effort to tie themselves up with menial violations when there are bigger fish to potentially fry.

And considering Georgia’s lax discretionary ambivalence about HOV lane violators, blackout license plate covers, jaywalking, and other seemingly innocuously negligible yet illegal misdemeanors, HB 673 seems destined to be as useless as most of these other laws, because if nobody’s going to bother enforcing it, what’s really the point?

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Oh, Atlanta #776

Despite the fact that it ended up being an epic game, I’m glad I didn’t go to the National Championship.  One, it was simply too fucking expensive.  Two, with the president coming in for it, it would undoubtedly become a bigger shit show than it normally would have been.  And three, I simply fucking hate crowds.

Don’t get me wrong, I still tried to get tickets from a company give away, but with hopes of winning them, and flipping them for thousands of dollars, to which I could use to spend on some actual home improvements, that’s how much they would’ve commanded.  But I had zero intention or interest of going to the National Championship despite the fact that it featured the hometown Georgia Bulldogs and was being played in the heart of College Football Mecca, here in Atlanta.

Crowds.  Fuck that.  I absolutely loathe crowds.  I’ve been to two Wrestlemanias and have zero desire to go to another.  I’ve been to Falcons games and Braves games, and I have little motivation to go to many more without good reason.  It’s a miracle I still bother attending Dragon*Con and it’s nearly 70,000 attendees every year, although afterwards every time I go through a spell of saying I don’t want to do it again.

But the National Championship game?  Short of Virginia Tech being in it, I can’t say that I’d want to go to one, even if it were literally within walking distance.  Articles like this one justify all of the reasons why going would have been a terrible idea; from MARTA shitting the bed like expected at the extremely high volumes of attendees, from the presence of the president and the Secret Service adding 50 layers of security to an already abysmal situation, forcing people to wait literally hours outside in the dreary rainy conditions.  Without question, I my day would’ve been ruined before even getting to my seat, which for many didn’t happen until the game had already kicked off.

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Predictions for National Championship Day

Today is National Championship Day in honor of the College Football National Championship being played tonight.  It has a little bit more meaning this year than it has in previous years, because not only is it being played right here in Atlanta, the two teams vying for the National Championship are Georgia and Alabama, basically two teams that are within a three-hour drive from the Mercedes-Benz Stadium and can declare it their home field, based on proximity or frequency of how many games they’ve played there.

It’s supposed to rain today, and was scheduled to have already started and turned the city into an icy catastrophe but surprising nobody such has yet to occur.  It was actually a rather clear and pleasant morning drive into work today in fact.  But if it ever does rain and the extra low temperatures we’ve been getting over the last week take hold of it, it could lead to some inconveniences to people like me who, work jobs and drives to and from them.

Also, the president has also decided to grace the city with his presence for this momentous occasion, because there’s no secret he can’t resist a scene, regardless of the fact that he’s demonstrated zero interest in any sports other than his own frequent personal golfing habits, and the fact that Atlanta is a city that in all likelihood hates him passionately after he called it “crime-infested” at one point.  It’s still a major, major event with a multiplied hype behind it, and why not go for the trifecta of bombing the city with even more insanity and hoopla than showing up?

Needless to say, in a rare instance of foresight, the vast majority of Atlanta has actually decided to shut down, or at least acknowledge and/or make accommodations for the fact that today is a particularly volatile National Championship Day.  The government has mostly shut down, most companies in the heart of the city have declared half or telecommuniting days, and once Atlanta Public Schools and Fulton County decided to close in light of expected weather and traffic problems, most of the metropolitan counties have followed suit.

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