sure, city by city and neighborhood by neighborhood... but my point is that you have a viable business, even if you only cover one city or even one neighborhood

sure, city by city and neighborhood by neighborhood... but my point is that you have a viable business, even if you only cover one city or even one neighborhood. Most of my traffic is to work and back. Assuming that you have cheap/open source software (a big assumption) you could even setup federation. Like you and your crew setup a co-op in one area, and get a lot of riders through personal contacts. I and my friends setup a similar drivers co-op in a nearby area, and similarly use our contacts to build up a very local critical mass. With federation, you could set it up so that if one of my drivers went to your area, say to drop off a customer, they could optionally be put on your network, either to work there, or maybe just to get customers on your network who wanted to go to my area. I mean, you still have the huge problems of bad behavior, but I don't think uber/lyft have really addressed those problems very well, either. I think those problems are really hard, and maybe those problems would be easier to solve with a bunch of smaller but federated companies than with two large companies? Maybe not. I don't know. I'm just saying, I think a lot of the critical mass issues could be pushed off to local leaders.