How I Write and Fact-Check Everything Here

Why this site exists

I built RideWise because I was tired of opening Uber and Lyft one after the other before every NYC commute, just to compare the price. The whole site — the city guides, the airport pages, the blog — is downstream of one question: did this help someone book a cheaper, smarter, or safer ride? If I read a draft and the honest answer is no, the page gets rewritten or it doesn’t ship. I’d rather publish less than publish noise.

Where the numbers come from

Anytime you see a dollar amount, percentage, or date on RideWise, it’s coming from one of three places, in order of how much I trust them:

Primary sources. Uber and Lyft’s own help-center pages, airport authority filings (LAWA, Port Authority, Massport), state and city regulators (NYC TLC, CA PUC), and federal agencies like BLS. When LAX bumped the rideshare pickup fee from $5 to $12 in July 2026, I pulled the change from the LAWA board filing the same week. If a primary source contradicts something I’ve already published, the page gets corrected, not the other way around.

RideWise first-party data. I maintain a rate-card database covering 300+ US cities and 47 airports, refreshed monthly against the public Uber and Lyft fare pages. I also run my own tracking experiments — the 30-day NYC Price Lock study was 500 real rides I priced and tracked by hand over a month. When I cite our own data, I try to give you the sample size so you can judge it yourself.

Reputable secondary reporting. Reuters, Bloomberg, NYT, WSJ, Forbes, TechCrunch, plus peer-reviewed academic work (the Johns Hopkins Carey study of 2,200 rides is a recent favorite). I link to the source inline so you can click through and verify, not buried in a footnote.

I don’t paraphrase from content farms, AI summaries, or random Reddit threads. If I mention something I saw on Reddit, I’ll say so explicitly and treat it as an anecdote, not a fact.

How I fact-check

Before a page goes live, it gets the same four passes from me:

I write the draft and cite sources inline as I go — not after — because if I save citations for the end I always forget where something came from. Then I do a number pass: every dollar amount, every percentage, every date, I open the source again and confirm it. Then a link pass: I click every external link and make sure the page actually loads and still says what I quoted. Finally a read-through where I read the whole thing top to bottom looking for stuff that sounds like nobody would actually say it out loud.

High-traffic pages get re-checked at least every 90 days because rideshare pricing moves fast. Rate-card data feeding the city pages gets refreshed monthly.

My honest AI policy

Yes, I use AI tools. Specifically: I use them to synthesize background research, to draft outlines, to suggest copy edits, and to write code for the data pipelines that ingest rate cards. I do not use AI to write a draft and then publish it without rewriting it myself.

Here’s the line I hold: every published article on RideWise has been read, edited, and shipped by me personally. If an article relies meaningfully on AI for the actual analysis (not just drafting), I’ll say so in a callout at the top of the article so you know.

The first-party experiments — the NYC Price Lock study, the LAX fare tracking, the airport pickup zone observations — those were physically done by me. AI didn’t take 500 rides on the Williamsburg Bridge.

How often things get updated

Rideshare pricing is the worst possible category for “set it and forget it” content. So I run on this cadence:

The rate cards behind every fare estimate get pulled monthly. The top 20 highest-traffic articles get a full re-read every quarter. When something material breaks in the news — LAX’s July 2026 fee hike, a new state law, a major surge change — I aim to publish an update within 7 days.

Every blog post shows the visible “Last updated” date at the top, and the date in the schema matches. If I’ve updated a page recently, you should see it.

What I make money on

RideWise has no affiliation with Uber or Lyft and earns zero commission on rides booked through the comparisons. The site is monetized through display advertising via Google AdSense (when approved) and a small set of unrelated travel-tool affiliate partnerships, all disclosed inline where they appear. I don’t recommend a provider because they pay me — the rate-card data picks the winner, not me.

Why my name is on everything

I write under my real name, with my real photo, with a real LinkedIn link, because I think pen names on a money site are a red flag — for readers and for Google. If I get something wrong, I want you to know exactly who got it wrong. Full background is on the team page.

If I got something wrong

Email hello@getridewise.com with the URL and what looks off — I read every correction email. The full timeline (when I acknowledge, when I verify, when I update) is on the corrections page. I don’t silently delete content. If I retract something, I’ll explain why.