Google Maps Removes Uber Integration (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Back in January 2017, Google and Uber teamed up to put a cool feature in Google Maps: You could search for, book, and pay for an Uber all directly from Google Maps. You didn't even need the Uber app installed. Now, 18 months later, the feature is dead. Google posted a new support page (first spotted by Android Police) that flatly states, "You can no longer book Uber rides directly in Google Maps."

The feature would have you search for a location in Google Maps and ask for directions like normal, but instead of choosing walking, driving, biking, or mass transit directions, a tab for ride-sharing would allow you to book a ride directly. The ride-sharing tab still exists, but instead of booking an Uber, it just gives you an estimate and offers to kick you out to the Uber app.

Comments

Re:"Ride sharing"

[SvnLyrBrto]

I really suspect that the bulk of the anti-user slashdotters (And anti-Uber people win general) live in places where they drive to work, don'r go out drinking or clubbing (Assuming the latter are even available out in the suburbs.), and never had to rely on taxies; except maybe a couple of times a year to go to and from the airport. That, or they're too young to remember the days before Uber & Lyft, when it was taxis or MUNI's "Owl" service, or nothing. So they just don't know just how terrible traditional taxies are. I, OTOH, have lived in a city where taxis are the occasional necessity since well before Uber existed; and had to suffer the awfulness of cabbies for many years. Then things changed. I started using Uber when they still called themselves Ubercab, were available only in San Francisco, and the only option was the black car service the ran about 50% more expensive then the taxis they replaced. And I never looked back.

And traditional taxis are really just bloody awful. If traditional taxis were not so spectacularly craptacular, Uber, Lyft, and the like would never have gotten a foothold in the first place. And the taxi corporations are just bad as Uber ever has been. And they've been at their shenanigans for a good half-century, or linger, before Uber was even a thing. It's just that Uber's problems came to light in the social media era; where the taxis have buried the worst of their misdeeds (Bribing politicians into erecting barriers to entry like the medallions, for example.) in the annals of history.

For my part, if my choice is between a scummy company where the car actually shows up when I summon it, the drivers never (and don't have the option to) try to run the "my credit card machine is broken, cash only" scam, who don't bitch (or refuse to take me at all) if I need to go out to the avenues, who will actually pick me up in those same avenues, and whose cars have never smelt of smoke, pee, or vomit; versus an equally scummy company where none of that is true, and which has been scummily abusing the public since before I was born; I'll take the former every time.