> a single delivery driver can take an optimized route... This is an oft-repeated claim that never seems to actually exist in real life. One of the original pi

> a single delivery driver can take an optimized route... This is an oft-repeated claim that never seems to actually exist in real life. One of the original pitches of Uber et al was that it would make the whole system so efficient that drivers would get paid more overall thanks to [insert hand-waving here] technology. It's been many years since that promise was made and nothing like it has materialized. For one thing the ability to "batch" things like this is really minimal. You can't put 10 food orders into a single car, because the 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th persons will be receiving cold food. Even if you could batch two orders together, that relies on a level of scale that simply isn't reliably replicable (two orders within a narrow time window of each other, to very nearby restaurants, to destination generally near each other). I've personally seen it happen twice. And then we've also discovered that the delivery gig economy adds a massive new inefficiency that fully offsets the few batching inefficiencies that can be exploited (and then some): idling cars for fast response. It turns out if you want a delivery driver to be around quickly on-demand, you need a lot of cars idling/driving aimlessly, which overall produces even more waste than the status quo.