Uber, the company that will deliver a cab (and, on one glorious day, ice cream) to your doorstep with the tap of a smartphone button, has really gotten into the idea of delivering services to rich people. For one day, fancy machers with beach homes will be able to summon a car that will drive to a helicopter that will take off and land in East Hampton.
On July 3, from noon to 8 p.m., Uber users can use their app to get picked up anywhere in the city, driven to the nearest heliport — at Wall Street, West 30th Street, or East 34th Street — and flown out to East Hampton airport. Uber is also extending its more traditional SUV service to the Hamptons for the summer, from Wednesday through Labor Day.
UberCHOPPER will be operational for this one day only — for now, at least. Josh Moher, general manager of Uber NYC, tells us that the chopper service is an “experiment extending our logistics fabric to new modes of transportation” and that they’ll be “looking closely” at how it goes.
Idling an SUV in beach traffic isn’t the most energy-efficient way to spend your afternoon on July 3 either. But we’re pretty sure spending 40 minutes in a helicopter, one of the least energy-efficient modes of transportation there is, is worse.
Since it’s time for summer fantasies, we’re going to indulge in a daydream that cap-and-trade passed and that the carbon surcharges would make this ride — already $600 per person — so expensive that even rich people would decide it was an unaffordable luxury, sell their beach houses, and let the Hamptons return to the wild.
