Uber has a plan to make rides more affordable in the outer boroughs — if you’re willing to walk a couple of extra blocks, that is.
Beginning on Thursday at 1 p.m., Uber Pool riders in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island will get offered 10 to 20 percent off their fare in exchange for agreeing to walk to a nearby pickup point, The Post has learned.
As such, the discounted outer-borough service will mimic the way Pool works in Manhattan, using a route-mapping algorithm to direct passengers to a pickup point that can sometimes be more than a block away.
Still, Uber won’t be eliminating Pool pickups at your front door altogether. If, for example, customers are in an unsafe neighborhood after dark, they can forgo the discount and have a car come to their door.
In a preview of the feature viewed by The Post, a passenger in Brownsville had the option to pay $5.76 for a standard Pool ride, or $4.71 if they agreed to be picked up within a two-block radius of their apartment.
“Uber won’t leave riders in the outer boroughs stranded, despite Mayor de Blasio’s attempt to limit Uber,” a company spokesperson said, referring to a one-year cap on permits for ride-sharing cars signed into law by the mayor in August.
Uber drivers will earn the same amount of money regardless of which option their riders select, the spokesperson said.
The changes to Pool are the latest effort by Uber to boost service in the Big Apple. Last month, it rolled out a fleet of city-mapping cars equipped with roof-mounted 360-degree cameras to map streets and intersections in the Big Apple and nearby suburbs.
In August, it updated its app to allow customers traveling to LaGuardia and JFK airports to select their airline so drivers could get better terminal and gate information.


