After Giving Up Ride-Hailing Completely, Here Are 7 Things We Noticed About Getting Around | Hack Your Life

The fifth installment in our National Day digital-detox series. This one is about ride-hailing.

People in China's tier-one cities have gotten used to the fact that cabs are hard to get again.

Open Didi Express at rush hour and it is routine to be a dozen or even dozens of places back in the queue — and rush hour now seems to fall at random moments all day long, as if the very act of wanting a car creates one. Go somewhere busier for a coffee, Beijing's Sanlitun or Zhongguancun, and you had better start hailing the moment you sit down, so that by the time you want to leave you can just about get a car.

We are only five years removed from the last era when cabs were hard to get.

Around 2013, ride-hailing apps made catching a car easier. As Didi, Kuaidi, and Uber fought for the market, heavy subsidies pushed the number of ride-hailing users up 559.4% in a single year, raised ride-hailing's share of city trips, and got people into the habit of traveling this way.

Later, even as the subsidies cooled, carpooling kept cheap car-hailing alive.

Spend a little more, travel with less friction. Once that becomes a habit, can you really go back to waving at taxis from the curb?

Between September 8 and 15, Didi went through a rectification and suspended its late-night service. That week I tried to travel without any ride-hailing at all: from midnight on Saturday, September 8, to midnight on Friday, September 15, I could not use any app-booked car or taxi service — Didi, Shenzhou, Yidao, Shouqi, Caocao, any of them — and had to rely on flagging down taxis plus public transit.

I live near the office, so I commute on foot, but my job sends me out to interviews at random addresses, anywhere from four or five kilometers away to more than ten. To use the time on the road to prepare questions or file copy, I'd take a ride-hailing car when the schedule allowed, and switch to subway plus a shared bike when traffic was bad.

The experiment ran for five days in Beijing and two in Hangzhou.

Over that week I found that taxis really have gotten harder to catch, and that changing how I traveled also changed how my friends and I got together. Public transit can in theory take you anywhere, but laziness isn't the only reason people skip the subway. I also made a "discovery" that is not new at all: you can still book a cab by phone.

None of this means life is impossible without ride-hailing — everyone has lived through a time without it. But going back after you're used to convenience always hurts, the way it hurts to return to the old K- and T-series trains once you've had high-speed rail.

Your expectations have changed. And since app-based car-hailing exploded in 2013, at least in Beijing, the main city of our experiment, the city's other ways of getting around have not developed anywhere near as fast. Taxis, buses, and shared bikes have gone backward.

Here is my experiment report.

The moment a gathering really ends is now "my car is here"

The experiment officially began at midnight on Saturday. Around ten on Friday night, a few friends who had finally finished working late wanted to meet up, and a question that had never been a question for me came up: normally I'd hail a car without thinking and go join them, but now I had to work out how I'd get home from outside the Fourth Ring Road if we talked until one or two in the morning.

We settled on moving the gathering to my apartment. Everyone is talking about "consumption downgrading" anyway, so we made tea, opened some wine, and talked at home. One friend said that if it came to it, we could lay bedding on my living room floor — which, a few years ago, was simply how gatherings ended.

Didi had suspended its late-night service, but when the evening broke up my friends got cars through Dida, Shouqi, and Shenzhou, and went home.

On day three, a friend came by to pick up some calligraphy supplies and stayed to practice writing with me. Didi's 11 p.m. cutoff was, for her, the midnight of Cinderella: be home before it, or don't get home at all.

After the experiment ended we hosted several more of these evenings at my place. Everyone kept saying "I have work tomorrow, I should head back early," but every time we opened a car-hailing app we were dozens of places back in the queue, so these small gatherings always dragged past eleven or twelve, the second half turning into everyone curled up on the sofa with a laptop, doing their own work.

The moment a gathering really ends has shifted from "whenever I feel like leaving" to "whenever the car arrives."

Taxis are harder to catch than they were before ride-hailing existed

On day two I set out for a friend's home six kilometers away, to see her and her newborn. At that distance I'd normally hail a car without a thought: ten-odd yuan against a bus ride with a kilometer of walking at each end is an easy call.

At ten in the morning, ready to go, I texted her: I'll be there in twenty minutes.

Twenty minutes later I was still at the curb, waving.

A few days afterward, at the Taobao Maker Festival, I met a Taobao shop owner who used to be a poet. She recited something she'd written years earlier during a Beijing downpour:

It rained hard that day, after you left / I stood on Fangyuan South Street / like Sun Wukong down on his luck / shouting at every taxi that passed / Shifu! — Cao Zhenyi, Heavy Rain

What I hadn't expected was to repeat that scene around Guomao Bridge, where cabs are usually easy, on a clear Sunday morning. Chang'an Avenue lay empty in front of me and most of the taxis that passed wouldn't stop. Two did stop, heard my destination, and drove off.

Now that taxis are largely plugged into ride-hailing platforms, many of the cabs on the road showing an "available" light are not available. Some are already booked; some drivers are cruising while listening to order announcements. So the number of taxis actually left for people flagging one down is far smaller than the number of taxis on the road.

Five years on, Beijing has no more taxis than it did. The distant memory of being turned down by drivers, back when I first came to Beijing in 2014, seems to be returning.

To avoid repeating half an hour of waving in the blazing sun, my friend pulled out her phone and booked me a taxi for the trip home. On the way, the driver's phone kept reading out orders along routes he might be taking. He said he didn't use Didi, but: "Even without Didi, there's still Dida."

When I paid, he produced the payment QR code Didi makes for drivers, had me scan it, then swiped right on his screen and picked up a job heading to Olympic Forest Park.

Once people get used to ride-hailing, what they expect of a wait changes. The "car arriving in X minutes" estimate in the apps is often wrong, but what ride-hailing really sells is control over your trip. Once you're used to going straight from A to B, standing at the curb for half an hour again is not easy.

The problems I ran into that week were probably not problems at all five years ago. They were just daily life for anyone who needed to get somewhere.

Laziness isn't the only reason people give up on the subway

Beijing has the second-densest subway network in China after Shanghai, with 0.28 kilometers of line per 10,000 people. But next to other international cities — Tokyo, Paris, Seoul — Beijing's station density is low. Beijing has 0.02 stations per square kilometer; Paris has 0.76, or 38 times as many, and New York and Seoul have 0.59 and 0.5.

That may be one reason squeezing onto the Beijing subway can make you feel that "life isn't worth it."

During the experiment I took the subway far more often. In the past, deciding between the subway and a car also decided whether I had to change into shoes I could stand in for a long time. On the map, the nearest subway entrance is a few minutes' walk from home, but Guomao is an interchange between Line 1 and Line 10, and getting from my building to an actual train can mean walking more than 1.5 kilometers.

Check the map and there's nearly another kilometer to walk after you get off, so the walking can take longer than the ride. In cases like that I'd hail a car, accepting the risk of traffic: skipping the long walks and the transfer at both ends usually meant that once I saw Didi's estimated fare, I picked the car over the subway.

And when I'm racing for a high-speed train, thinking about transferring on Line 1 with no elevators and weighing my suitcase, leaving extra time to hail a car is not hard to understand.

On work trips I lean toward hailing a car rather than taking public transit. For the last two days of the experiment I went to Hangzhou, and when I couldn't flag a taxi I hitched a ride in a car another reporter had booked, instead of opening a map to look up a bus or subway route.

I've been to Hangzhou for work many times and have never studied its bus routes — partly because those trips are always rushed, and partly because, once you have ride-hailing, knowing your way around an unfamiliar city is no longer a survival skill. I only need to know exactly where I'm standing and wait for the driver to come get me.

Bus routes and bus riders have both thinned out

Late at night, flagging a taxi out of the heart of Sanlitun — I mean right outside the Uniqlo at Taikoo Li, the busiest spot there is — is close to impossible.

Before the last Line 10 train leaves Tuanjiehu station, you can walk ten minutes to the subway and get out; once you're on a train you can go anywhere. If you don't feel like walking, the three-wheelers Beijingers call "sanbengzi" are waiting, as long as you'll pay the markup. A woman driver from Henan told me that when the crowd is thin it's 10 yuan to the subway station, and at night, when there are more people, the price climbs: 15, sometimes 20. "It mostly depends on how many people there are."

She said the business looks good but the money isn't much: 300 yuan takes 24 hours of driving straight. While you're deciding whether to head for the subway, one unlicensed car after another, each with a thin red light in the window, rolls down a window to ask where you're going. A trip that costs under 50 yuan by taxi, even with peak-hour pricing doubled, starts at 100 yuan from these drivers and can reach 150.

On day four I tried the bus. One route runs straight from outside Sanlitun SOHO to the foot of my building, but the sign at the stop said the last bus leaves at 11 p.m.

When you've waited twenty minutes and nothing has come, a question starts nagging: is the bus I'm waiting for the last one? Or the second-to-last, stuck in traffic somewhere? Or has the last one already gone?

A colleague later told me that mini programs like Che Lai Le (Bus Is Coming) and Tencent's bus-tracking service will show you where a bus actually is in real time. I never remembered to try them. In my mind, a bus is a thing you wait for. (Which is probably also my excuse for not taking buses more often.)

The sense that there are fewer buses isn't just my own impression.

Data shows that over the past year Beijing "optimized" 225 bus routes in total, cutting 1,075.5 kilometers of overlapping route length.

"Surface bus ridership keeps falling as a range of factors pull passengers away," said Cao Yan, assistant general manager of the Beijing Bus Group. Besides the growth of rail transit in recent years, he said, more private cars, higher fares, the relocation of population out of the city center, and the explosive growth of ride-hailing and bike-share have all cut into bus ridership. Last year ridership in the six central districts fell 12.2%, while suburban ridership grew 0.9%. So this year's frequent "optimizing" mainly meant cutting routes in the six central districts and adding them in the suburbs.

Shared bikes have gotten both scarcer and shabbier

That week I biked anything under three kilometers. To keep the experiment close to an office worker's routine, I went out to try at 8 a.m. and again at 6 p.m.

Also not easy.

The curbs look packed with shared bikes, but few of them can be ridden. Ever since Beijing capped the deployment of new shared bikes, and the bubble in the whole bike-share industry burst, your odds of scanning open a working bike on a Beijing street have dropped sharply.

According to figures from the Beijing Municipal Commission of Transport, the number of shared bikes in the city has fallen to 1.91 million, flat against the figure released at the end of April. The commission also said vehicle-monitoring data shows that in parts of Beijing monthly active use of shared bikes is under 50%, with nearly half the fleet sitting idle.

After the bubble burst, second-tier bike-share brands left the market together, but the game capital had been playing left its legacy on the streets: bikes nobody rides and nobody collects.

The leading brands, meanwhile, have cut subsidies hard, and the surplus bikes are in poor shape. That is why so many shared bikes sit along the roadside unridden and unridable. Counting from 2016, it has been more than two years since the first bikes from Mobike, Ofo, and the rest appeared on the street.

With less money to burn and the government limiting new deployments, more and more of the shared bikes on Beijing's streets have been patched up — and not necessarily fixed properly, like seats that can no longer be raised or lowered.

Leaving at 4:30 a.m. for a flight? You can still call 96103

On day four I realized my flight to Hangzhou the next morning left at 6:00, which meant leaving home by 4:30 at the latest. Normally I'd book an airport transfer in advance through Didi or Trip.com, so I wouldn't have to worry about oversleeping or about failing to find a car that early.

At 4:30 in the morning the subway isn't running and the first airport shuttle bus doesn't leave until 5:10. However I worked it out, public transit wasn't going to get me there in time. Out of ideas, I posted to WeChat Moments: "6 a.m. flight, no ride-hailing allowed — how do I get from Guomao to Terminal 2?"

I got 105 replies. The solutions came down to these:

• Call 96103 and book a taxi (this came from friends who have lived in Beijing for years; friends who moved here more recently mostly don't know the option exists);
• Ride a shared bike there (what kind of friends do I have?);
• Book a hotel near the airport the night before and use its shuttle in the morning;
• Use Shansong or Lalamove and have yourself delivered to the airport like a parcel (strictly speaking that counts as ride-hailing too, so it's out);
• Rent a car-share vehicle and drive yourself (a pity I don't have a license);
• A fair number of people also held that any chauffeured-car service other than Didi doesn't count as "ride-hailing," and suggested Shouqi or Shenzhou;
• Some friends offered to drive me to the airport as a favor, booked over WeChat (does that count as ride-hailing too?)

In the end I phoned for a taxi. The call took a little over a minute, half of it spent giving the operator my address, since they confirm it character by character. Less than ten minutes after I hung up, the driver they'd dispatched called me, and the trip was locked in. At the airport the next morning I paid five yuan more than a normal taxi fare: the service charge for phone dispatch.

On the way I looked into 96103. The phone-dispatch platform now has an official website and a WeChat official account that take bookings online. Since launch, the site has drawn about 270,000 visitors in total.

To charter a car for a whole day, ride-hailing is still the most reliable option

On day three, I cheated.

That day a colleague and I went to Tianjin for interviews, out and back in one day, but every place we needed to visit was in Tianjin's far suburbs. We'd hoped to find a local friend with a car who could spend the day with us. Of course we couldn't find one who was both free and knew the area, so ride-hailing looked like the only option: you can book it from another city, and, more important, the price is transparent.

My colleague booked a full-day charter on Caocao Zhuanche. At 9 a.m., our driver, Mr. Du, picked us up at Tianjin railway station, and we were on the road all day until 5:30 p.m., when we reached Tianjin East station and boarded the high-speed train home. The base price for the day was 550 yuan, with extra mileage and time billed on top; we covered 178 kilometers and spent about 750 yuan.

Mr. Du drives for Caocao full time. Before Caocao entered Tianjin he drove Didi Premier. The biggest difference is that Caocao pays a fixed salary, with a bonus and dispatch system far simpler than Didi's, and he doesn't have to think about the platform's cut. He does have to log a set number of hours during the morning and evening rush to earn his full pay.

Almost every Didi driver is unsure about the future

After the experiment ended, my withdrawal from digital services set in: in one week I placed as many ride-hailing orders as I normally would in two.

A Didi Express driver surnamed Zhang said nothing after I got in and only opened up once I started talking to him. "These days, if you passengers don't speak first, I don't dare say anything." He pointed at the Didi app on his phone: "The whole ride is recorded now, isn't it? I'm afraid of complaints."

After that week's rectification measures, which suspended late-night service, Didi launched full-trip recording: during a ride, driver and passenger are recorded separately and the audio is uploaded to Didi's servers, where it is kept for seven days; if a complaint or dispute comes up, Didi or the police can pull it.

Recording every trip saves Didi a great deal of trouble. What it actually does is push the company's operating costs onto passengers and drivers again.

Passengers complain for all sorts of reasons — he didn't know the route, he talked too much, he didn't talk enough. Every complaint costs Mr. Zhang credit points, and every complaint affects the orders he gets.

Because he hasn't obtained an operating license, since January he has used the "block airport and railway station orders" feature Didi introduced this year, and takes only trips inside the city. "I'm afraid of getting caught. I don't know anyone personally who has been, but everybody in the group chats says a single fine is at least 15,000 yuan. So I just drive around town, that works too," he said.

On the way to Beijing South railway station to catch a high-speed train, a Didi Premier driver surnamed Liu told me that after car rental and fuel, he takes home only 6,000 to 7,000 yuan a month, about what a taxi driver makes. I asked whether there was a bonus for driving over the National Day holiday. "If they feel like giving you a bonus, they give it to you. If they don't, they don't."

"We've got blue skies now, and it's us migrant workers who paid for them — everything's been shut down. I used to work at power plants, factories, suppliers, chemical plants, big electrical jobs, all of it." Mr. Liu is a structural-steel welder by trade and has worked sites all over the country. Starting last winter, factories and projects everywhere shut down one after another. A friend in Beijing suggested he try driving, so he came, and he has been driving for Didi about six months.

"He said you could make good money in a month. I never figured the rent would be this much — six thousand a month, seventy thousand a year. Two years of that and you could buy the car outright." To earn a bit more, Mr. Liu goes out at five in the morning and doesn't stop until past eight at night, making do at midday with something like a jianbing wrap. He thinks of himself as adaptable, but six months after changing trades he's already thinking about changing again.

"My last passenger yesterday was on WeChat, and the person on the other end asked him what he'd do if he had money, and he turned around and asked me," he said. "I told him, if I had money I'd go south. I like how humid it is down south."

Back in my hometown, a second-tier provincial capital, another driver, also surnamed Liu, who drives Didi Select, told me he now makes around 7,000 yuan a month. He imagines that driving for Didi in Beijing or Shanghai must pay more. He got into the business two years ago, during the subsidy war between Didi and Uber.

His car's engine displacement and wheelbase don't meet the rules, so it doesn't qualify for ride-hailing. He knows that from this December platforms will stop sending orders to unlicensed drivers, but when I asked what he planned to do, he only repeated: "By the time I have no orders left, Didi will have gone under, so I'm not worried at all."

The "December" he means comes from an urgent notice on strengthening safety management of ride-hailing and private-car carpooling, issued jointly in early September by the general offices of the Ministry of Transport and the Ministry of Public Security. It states: "Before December 31, vehicles and drivers that fail to meet the requirements must be completely cleared out, and ride-hailing platform companies, vehicles, and drivers must basically achieve compliance."

The best moment for Didi, or for the whole ride-hailing market, was probably the summer of 2016, just after the Ministry of Transport declared ride-hailing legal. In those months, old and new rivals surrendered one after another and Didi took a monopoly on a market worth 100 billion yuan. Then things turned sharply downhill.

Two years ago, riding Uber or Didi Express, a driver would occasionally remind you: don't call me shifu. Say "sir" politely as you got in, chat a while, and you might come away with material to write about. Two years after the new ride-hailing rules took effect, local governments across the country have generally relaxed their requirements on vehicle models, but not on household registration (hukou) or license plates, and public opinion about Didi has swung to the opposite extreme. Passengers and drivers alike are full of grievances against the platform.

Today the question people care about is how to get home safely from a ride-hailing trip; nobody minds anymore whether you call the driver shifu. With so many non-compliant drivers and cars on the platforms, a driver taking orders in his own car has effectively reverted to running a "black cab."

The regulators have moved. Starting September 5, the Ministry of Transport, with other relevant departments, local authorities, and outside experts, began special safety inspections of the country's main ride-hailing and carpooling platforms. The team's first stop was Didi, for an on-site inspection lasting half a month.

In Hangzhou, the 14 ride-hailing platforms that already hold operating licenses signed a pledge at a meeting on regulating ride-hailing, promising that from October 1 each of them would stop dispatching orders to vehicles and drivers without ride-hailing licenses.

Meanwhile Meituan's ride-hailing service, which on entering Shanghai early this year loudly claimed it would "take a third of the market within days," has quietly stopped. Meituan's filings show that in the first four months of this year the company spent as much as 976 million yuan on ride-hailing drivers, but the same prospectus also reveals its new attitude toward that very expensive business: "Based on current market conditions, we do not expect to further expand this initiative."

Ride-hailing is running again after its rectification, but the difficulty of getting a car may not get any better.

Cover image taken by the author

Starting October 3, QDaily Lab has been publishing five life experiments over the holiday on the theme of "quitting." What we want to explore is this: among the endless stream of internet services and technologies, which ones end up indispensable to daily life? Does their existence raise the quality of life, or just feed laziness and dependence?

This is the last installment of our National Day digital-detox series.