I don't really think humans are better equipped to route 10-15 cars in a region factoring in drivers' preferences for direction, pickup and dropoff zone attract

I don't really think humans are better equipped to route 10-15 cars in a region factoring in drivers' preferences for direction, pickup and dropoff zone attractiveness to drivers, and traffic. See this research on human solutions to the vehicle routing problem: "When comparing the human performance with the optimal solution and classical heuristics (nearest neighbor, savings, and sweep), we see that participants typically perform better than the worst heuristic and worse than the best heuristic" [1]. All of these algorithms are pretty naive baselines and you can do a lot better with actual routing software. And this being a low margin winner take all business, Uber being slightly better with algorithms makes it substantially better as an option compared to the coop. Also I think you're underestimating the difficulty of consistent hiring. You can definitely find a good dispatcher in NYC, but can you scale that level of skill to the entire US? [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305054820300794 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03050...