Ride-sharing is making my life easier | members only

I’m not a technical person, so I hadn’t tried ride-sharing because I was kind of afraid of it. Of course, I’d heard of Lyft and Uber, but I didn’t understand. I figured I'd probably

screw it up. When I did finally try it, it was forced upon me! My sister Mary and I had flown to Los Angeles to go to art museums and galleries — I’m an artist in Santa Cruz. But we didn’t

want to rent a car because neither of us wanted to drive in L.A. I know my way around. I went to grad school in Long Beach and lived there for 10 years. But I’m older now — I just turned 80

— and navigating and parking seemed like a handful.   Mary had reserved a car service to pick us up, but they never showed. It was a local company, and they seemed legitimate, and they

didn’t take our money, so I don’t know what happened. But there we were at this huge airport with no way to get to where we were staying. So we were kind of wandering in front of the

terminal, and somebody said there’s this place called LAXit, and you go there and there’s taxis and buses. We went over there thinking, “What are we going to do?” But when we got to LAXit,

there was this young kid who worked there. I said to him, “Excuse me. How do I get an Uber?” He said, “Give me your phone,” and he put the app in and put in the address where we were going.

I just had to enter my credit card number. You better believe I gave him a great tip! Gregorius waits to be picked up by Uber, suitcase in tow. She loves the convenience of ride-sharing — no

more finding a place to park or slow airport shuttles. Gabriela Hasbun The driver took us right to our hotel, no problem. After that, whenever we wanted to ride-share, we just typed into

the app where we wanted to go. It has a map, and it knows your location from your phone. Then the app gives you an alert, and it says the driver’s name, when they’ll be arriving, the kind of

car they’re driving, and the license plate is XYZ. And they tell you the price in advance, which is good. It wasn’t expensive. It felt extremely safe. And our drivers were very patient and

kind with us. They would even point out things along our routes, kind of like they were our tour guides. They were almost like friends. Their job was to get us someplace and they were

protective of us, and they were going to get us there. They were our allies.