Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Is a taxi or Uber driver more likely to rip you off on the way to the airport?

Think twice the next time you’re hailing a ride to the airport.

Have you ever gotten the feeling a taxi driver is taking you for a ride? Consider taking a Lyft or Uber instead, researchers say. Taxis take unnecessarily long detours on about 7% of routes from airports, a study distributed this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research found, and the detours are even longer for tourists. This leads to more time spent on the road and higher fares.

It’s harder for ride-sharing apps to get away with that kind of behavior. “Uber has tools in place to prevent this,” Erik Brynjolfsson a researcher at MIT Sloan School of Management, who co-wrote the paper with Meng Liu, a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis, said. “You can watch the trip on the dashboard and rate drivers, so it’s easier to say if you’re unhappy whereas it’s relatively difficult to do that in a taxi.”

The study examined data from 95,357 New York City UberX rides, which are not shared or pooled, involving 23,974 Uber drivers. It compared those rides with taxi trips that had the same origin points and airport destinations. It also compared trips from various places in Manhattan to John F. Kennedy International Airport, for which passengers always pay a flat fee, to trips to LaGuardia Airport, which don’t have a fixed fee, and found there were more detours on rides to and from LaGuardia.

Taxis are more likely to rip off customers because there is less opportunity for feedback, researchers said. Some 73% of trips on Uber are rated by passengers and, of those, one in 170 trips get a partial or total refund after a passenger reports an unsatisfactory experience. In contrast, NYC taxi complaints are more difficult to lodge and occur for only one in every 6,356 trips. The New York Taxi Workers Alliance did not respond to request for comment.

Both taxi and ride-share drivers sometimes must spend hours waiting to pick up a fare at the airport, according to Ippei Takahashi, the chief executive officer and founder of rideshare comparison site RideGuru. That gives drivers more incentive to go out of their way for higher fares. The average wait time is 15 to 30 minutes, but can be more than two hours long, according to the RideGuru.

Riders who want to avoid unnecessarily long routes can take Uber or Lyft, Takahashi said.

“The fact that there is a paper trail for the routes taken and all transactions enforces accountability,” he said. “Because of the transparency and the fact that everything is documented, drivers are less likely to take detours for increasing the fares.”

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