Rideshare services - Uber, Lyft, Hailo, etc.

it's so convenient to call for a cab from anywhere in the philly metro area and get a ride in 5 min to anywhere honestly i'd happily pay more for the convenience. i worry that once uber is dead i'll just stop using taxis again.

I was kind of thinking of that for a business model the other day -- come up with businesses (or even better, non-profits) that create products to disrupt the disruptors

in the case of uber, you'd do the mapping/apps/payment structure, but also do the due diligence of coming up with an ad hoc standard legal framework that cities could sign on to. so anyone who wanted to run a uber-like franchise in a given city would pay for your service. if that means relatively deregulated individual operators in cities with few cabs, then it'd be closer to uber's model. if it was a larger city with licensing requirements, you'd sell to the companies in the space

do it

my idea was, you open the app, specify destination, notification goes out to available drivers, who have 30 seconds to respond, lowest bid gets the fare (or customer sees all fares next to driver scores/proximity and chooses)

that's the thing with uber, they have several pieces of their business they could easily separate but they're strongly linked together in order to wedge themselves into markets

roughly:
- sign-up for drivers and minimal due diligence (background check, proof of insurance, etc)
- disruption of existing transport model via skirting ad hoc and legal restrictions on the number of available cars available for paid transport (taxi licensing in NYC, allowing drivers to set their own schedules)
- single payment model
- standardizing different vehicles type/sizes for request
- technical framework to allow drivers to announce availability and passengers to request a ride

why are licensing restrictions / restrictions on number of available cars good?

flopson, that's a ridiculously encumbered system! uber's ratings system is garbage in many ways, but it glosses over a lot of the selection criteria in order to do the logical thing: provide you with a ride that meets your base requirements

having adjustable fares for different drivers without basing it on amenities is useless. basing it on some sort of "driver quality" is useless. if you have a preference for a certain driver or custom type of car, we're exactly back to the taxi system where you might have a cab you usually take and you make arrangements with your dude to be available to give you a ride

I mean, maybe that's an option and you give the ability to request a particular driver at a particular time

in SF the number of cars on the street at any given time has skyrocketed because of ride services, it has increased traffic and is super-fucking annoying

xp

why are licensing restrictions / restrictions on number of available cars good?

― Mordy, Wednesday, June 21, 2017 1:48 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you end up with burst events in city centers (or worse, other areas with limited road space) when major events end, where the number of cars on the road exceeds the traffic planning and the algorithmic pricing goes through the roof and the traffic slows to the point where half the number of cars, each making two trips, would be faster than the full number of cars attempting to make one trip

the point is not to have Uber die and go back to the shitty pre-Uber cabs situation, but to go to something better, what could have been possible before capital got its grubby hands on it and forced it into a natural monopoly w/ network externality

or unintended consequences: when uber came to my area, it was a few years after a revitalized bar area opened up downtown. prior to uber, there was a taxi stand on one corner. people would form a line, cars would line up on the side of a major street that wasn't directly in front of the bars, and the taxi company employed a security guy to make sure drunks didn't get in fights

as soon as uber became dominant, the taxi stand shut down, people started waiting all along the block directly in front of bars, and there was no orderly line or security. if people staggered their departure times it might be fine, but bars close at 2am

flopson, that's a ridiculously encumbered system! uber's ratings system is garbage in many ways, but it glosses over a lot of the selection criteria in order to do the logical thing: provide you with a ride that meets your base requirements

having adjustable fares for different drivers without basing it on amenities is useless. basing it on some sort of "driver quality" is useless. if you have a preference for a certain driver or custom type of car, we're exactly back to the taxi system where you might have a cab you usually take and you make arrangements with your dude to be available to give you a ride

I mean, maybe that's an option and you give the ability to request a particular driver at a particular time

I think you misunderstood my post but I'm on my phone so I don't want to type it again. my system is easy peasy. request ride, get some offers within 30 secs, choose the rider/proximity/fare you like best

waiting in a line sounds bad mh, let the drumks fight cmon

cities are taking a good look at how they license private transportation providers and where they can pick up passengers, and taxi companies are figuring out shit needs to change

if we had decent national policy guidance, or if transportation dollars went into research instead of barely maintaining a decaying road infrastructure things might not have gone this way

why would I not always pick the cheapest/closest driver?

the driver ratings would need to be normalized, and that becomes your problem, because if there are publicly available driver ratings it turns into yelp

in SF the number of cars on the street at any given time has skyrocketed because of ride services, it has increased traffic and is super-fucking annoying

xp

― Οὖτις,

I have friends in Long Beach who are super fed up with this shit

we're running toward the ideal vision where everyone drives for uber six days a week, goes out for dinner/drinks on the seventh, and takes an uber home

it's so irritating, instead of taking cars *off* the street in SF you have all these people driving their cars in from out-of-town to make money, resulting in several thousand more cars on the street than pre-uber, and they don't know how to drive in the city, they double-park everywhere (even in intersections!), it drives me up the fucking wall

tbf eventually the city will have to spend all its money maintaining local streets due to the extra wear, and when the people go to drive home the bridges will collapse from lack of maintenance

why would I not always pick the cheapest/closest driver?

the cheapest will often not be the closest that's the point. let's say you're far from second nearest cab, nearest guy can charge you more. drivers see each other on the map, gives them incentive to spread out

i agree ratings would have to be normalized. could be done by an intermediary or in-house

so they have a race to evaluate a distance number, your location, maybe your destination, and provide a quote for rate?

you might have a future in the gamification of commerce

drivers probably know those numbers quite well. but an app could come up with a preliminary fare which they could scale by a factor. also, you laugh but in most of the world cab fares are negotiated by drivers on the spot!

in most of the world cab fares are negotiated by drivers on the spot!

yup, and this never bothered me tbh

prices set by bosses who take a cut even though they offer nothing. my idea = fuck them, make an open platform, let drivers set their own rates competitively and keep all the money

does uber or any of the others require a destination be entered before you can request a ride?

I understand where it'd be useful -- some drivers wouldn't want to leave an area, or go too far -- but it opens a lot of problems

it didn't used to but does now ya

I guess it could fuzz the location and just give a general neighborhood for a drop-off point but I think there are a lot of reasons why you'd only want your driver to get your actual destination

like I could see someone I was stalking take out a phone to request a ride, pull the driver one up on my phone, and be pretty sure I know where they live

ok so it garbles it a bit

I would say something about drivers just always declining to take people to ethnic neighborhoods but outside of public transportation, people pull this all the time already

are uber drivers or can drivers forced to take rides? seems awkward in any set up

off the dome one way to incentivize is having drivers' acceptance rate as part of rating? I'll think about it

that is part of regulation of private transportation in many locales, yes

which is another thing uber gets around by not being a licensed taxi service or w/e

here's Chicago's page on taxi regulation:
https://www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/depts/bacp/supp_info/2012_passenger_information.html

In NYC I don't see how uber and the others survive when via is literally less than half the cost in most situations

rideaustin is leading the way there. they're a non profit. they're doing great, but they're in a weird position: market with a lot of potential and uber and lyft are banned.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Wednesday, 21 June 2017 18:34 (yesterday) Permalink

they've come back - https://www.texastribune.org/2017/06/21/rideaustin/

Ooof

wtf flopson itt

one semester of micro ain't the GUT bruh

what's GUT

http://www.theunrealtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/grand-unified-theory.jpg

prices set by bosses who take a cut even though they offer nothing. my idea = fuck them, make an open platform, let drivers set their own rates competitively and keep all the money

I don't disagree with this idea though

Government should run the platform btw

It can be called "meters"

When you open the meters app it asks you for a number, it can be called a "hack license number" which you also get from the government, it means you're not a felon and you're competent to drive strangers all around town

It's good but it's lacking a certain race to the bottom.

After a year of price gouging, threat cutting, screaming and formal complaints, the government can put a "rate" in the "meters" app and everybody has to abide by it

idk if i'm missing something but in the UK we have GETT which lets you order black cabs from wherever on your phone & it seems fine

except black cabs cost a small fortune???

also there's hailo? and for minicabs kabbee? a friend of mine used to swear by the latter

think those are all uk-only tho

Well, the UK isn't Silicon Valley, it's not their way to assume that their solutions work everywhere, or try to take over the wait hang on.

I don't disagree with this idea though

wait, why did you say 'wtf flops on itt' and 'microeconomics isn't grand unified theory' if you like my idea?? idgi

hailo went out of business in north america in 2014
https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/10/14/taxi-app-hailo-pulls-out-north-america/ZybacZCWurM1GuQ5Qy3dwL/story.html

fasten, a russian company, has tried to establish a footing here. it started in boston and went to austin shortly after uber and lyft pulled out. i don't seem to remember boston getting a party
http://www.kvue.com/news/local/fasten-fest-celebrating-one-year-in-austin/449992201