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The promise of sharing rides using an app was a great one. I could just pick someone up heading for a place near my work and make $3. When people used it for e
by jvanderbot 5y ago
The promise of sharing rides using an app was a great one. I could just pick someone up heading for a place near my work and make $3.
When people used it for employment, not sharing their ride but operating like a cab driver, uber leaned in and the stage was set for the clashes and class action that results in regulation, price increases, etc.
If they had stayed niche and stayed smallish, ride sharing could have accomplished what it was supposed to. Greed is powerful, and drivers saw no need to limit to just sharing a trip to the mall, and uber saw no reason to prevent people from using their platform for it.
- peatmoss 5y agoThe term “ride sharing” feels like an Orwellian anachronism as applied to current Uber/Lyft. Matching people who had to go from approximately the same place to approximately the same place had a lot of promise both to expand mobility, but also to address some “bowling alone” problems. Still, the fact that most cars sit idle IIRC > 95% of the time seems like there should be some genuine opportunity frontier. I think the dream was always to get to a point where autonomous driving and somewhat centralized route optimization could generate real efficiencies. But the Uber/Lyft needed to get people out of their own cars en masse for that to work. Autonomous driving didn’t appear at the right time for everything to work out, I think.
- jfrunyon 5y agoNone of the "ride sharing" services were ever meant as anything other than a taxi service. Ride sharing was solely an excuse to evade the law and if you can't see that then you aren't looking.