I'm not sure the exact reasons for minimum fares, but I'm not sure the driver is entirely irrelevant here. There could be a certain amount of emotion driving th

I'm not sure the exact reasons for minimum fares, but I'm not sure the driver is entirely irrelevant here. There could be a certain amount of emotion driving that decision. In any case, to answer your original question: Yes, I think halving the cost of taxis will make a significant difference to their viability in many use cases. I think costs may also fall further than that, as regulations have been limiting competition in taxi markets. (And just intuitively, one would expect that sharing a car should be cheaper than owning one.) Moreover, I think taxi markets were stagnant for a long time, so the lack of such a service in the past doesn't necessarily mean it couldn't have been viable, and the new players may simply not have explored this kind of service yet. >How do you pay for vehicles and maintenance of your service is not profitable? The point is that without a driver, your ongoing costs (i.e. fuel and maintenance) are more proportional to usage. A driver sitting doing nothing is costing you money, but a car sitting doing nothing barely does.