Does Uber have a patent moat or is their moat the brand?
For as much hate as they receive, I'm not sure why a driver-owned cooperative app has not emerged that takes no profit. Is there something like this we should all start using instead?
There isn't much technological innovation in ride-sharing that the FOSS community couldn't solve. I'd love to work in this area.
> driver-owned cooperative app that takes no profit
FWIW, the oversight of Uber on drivers is part of the success of Uber. I'm not talking about their mistreatments of drivers, but the fact that as a consumer I have reasonable confidence that the driver has been doing a decent job so far and that if I have a problem with the driver, there'd be some consequences through Uber.
It's part of what allowed their success: from unaccountable taxi mafias to a service consumers can trust.
It's far from perfect of course but it's good enough that I'm confident enough using Uber (although I avoid it for other reasons) even in foreign countries. It's probably not impossible to achieve with a co-op, but it seems more difficult
I've been treated to the the "you're so beautiful, do you have a boyfriend" act about 2% of the time[0] I get into a stranger's car pretty much across the board, which makes me a little bit skeptical about whether these companies do meaningful oversight. It's possible that these incidents go mostly unreported though. I didn't report mine.
As an aside, this is why I generally trust public transit more whenever it's an option. The worst case scenario is just so much less sinister when there are other people around than it is in a car alone with a stranger.
[0] once in a lyft in seattle, the other in a taxicab in barcelona. figuring I've taken about 100 lifetime solo car rides with strangers which is probably an overestimate.
Well there are two competing factors, one of which you pointed out--not every woman who experiences harassment reports it. The other which may be less obvious is that the people who behave this way tend to do so not only repeatedly but frequently. Eventually they may harass the wrong woman and get reported. Without knowing the numbers I can't speculate more about whether lyft knew about the driver who harassed me.
I definitely trust public transport more too. I have decent confidence in my uber rides but there’s no denying that being a man is certainly helping for that
This is my biggest problem with taxi service in the past. Unless they behave criminally towards you and you can go to police, you were at their mercy. Any cost had to be accepted, no idea how much it would cost upfront.
There were whole scam rings around that in some parts of Europe, taking foreign customers via very elongated roads to destination. Or a story from a colleague - taxi driver in Paris literally threw out a customer in the middle of highway since he didn't like his personal political views on famous french protests. In normal situation that would mean the taxi guy losing his 200k euro medallion, in reality of course nothing, zilch, nada.
Yes their moat is the brand, drunk women will get in an Uber and feel safe because corporate is ultimately putting their name on the line every ride. Nobody will feel safe dealing directly with random strangers.
This. Also, Waymo, if they keep scaling, is going to eat their lunch in this market. No human in the drivers seat is ultimately the solution to this problem.
Waymo costs more in areas where it operates right now yet I've heard people swear by it and state that they don't care how much more it costs, they'll always use a Waymo over an Uber or Lyft.
Which is a surprising viewpoint for those of us who don't have the safety concerns others may have but when you think about it, it makes complete sense.
Some searching suggests it’s not that far from 50:50 in terms of actual rides. Uber drivers average well under 20 hours per week. Taxi have significantly fewer drivers working much longer hours, but they dominate very short trips.
Makes sense to me. There is a lot of existing infrastructure anticipating cab companies. Airports, stadiums, hotels, resorts, etc. all with dedicated cab lines that can get you seated in a vehicle in seconds.
The ride apps solve the biggest concerns. They have driver ratings so you can see verification from many other riders that the driver is good and they have upfront pricing. Taxi's have started to use apps but at this point the trust is pretty much broken to anyone that's experienced the old "My meters not working but I'll give you a special rate" type of shit.
Essentially Taxi drivers are the random strangers over the apps with ratings and reviews from other riders showing clearly.
Given the quality of drivers and cars I have experienced, the ratings mean nothing.
Instead, I do get comfort in knowing that there is a database timestamped entry linking myself with an Uber driver identifier. Should something happen, I could theoretically complain/give a lead so investigators can locate my murdered body. Random cab is more anonymous and feels more dangerous in unfamiliar territory.
The idea is that drivers pay a flat fee per month and get to keep the entirety of the fare. I used it for a while but my desire to get somewhere fast outweighed my disdain for Uber as middleman. Eventually I went back to Uber/Lyft due to long wait times and unreliable pickups.
It is a lot more like "some guy giving you a ride" instead of a car service. My buddy initially pitched it to me as a cheap alternative to Uber for drivers that were banned from Uber. It is nice that they don't have surge pricing. Empower is somewhere in between the convenience and price of Uber and public transportation.
Yeah. India has nammayatri.in as well (opensource/open data btw!)
While it's availablity is very good, there are three competitors (one of which is uber) with better, more reliable availability so it's tough competition.
It's actually not that easy, especially at scale. Background checks cost money/time + compliance requirements are vastly different between regions/states/cities.
And there are tons of government systems you need to get data from. And some counties require in-person visit to obtain court records. And you need those records to make valid assessments.
Uber offers a lot more than just locating a driver. It’s a platform that generates a recommended route for the driver, shows the progress of the route to the customer in realtime so they know the driver is going the right direction, it calculates fares (e.g. distance, surge pricing, etc), and has other features like “share my ride details with my spouse” for example…for security purposes.
That’s just what i could think of off the top of my head and i’m not a product manager at uber. Things are NEVER as simple as they initially seem.
Other thoughts:
- at uber’s scale, payment processing alone likely takes up quite a bit of compute server side. You could outsource this to a 3rd party, but it’s still an expense as you scale.
- how would a decentralized system work if something goes wrong during the ride? who does the customer call? Drunk driver, attempted rape, etc. list of things that can go wrong is long.
- your platform/app would need to be smart enough to know where all the “proper” ride share pickup spots are at every airport. Not trivial!
- how would you offer a feature to “reserve a ride” like uber does, if you only build an app that can find “nearby drivers”?
food for thought. :) All im pointing out is this kind of product needs to be a platform and is likely not cheap to run. It’s not 90% client side. Unless you literally just want to reinvent the taxi concept, in which case maybe the 90% client side approach is feasible.
There are such apps. In Sweden there is Fair, but from what I can gather it uses an app produced by ATOM Mobility, so I take it they use a ready-made platform. Check it out.
For as much hate as they receive, I'm not sure why a driver-owned cooperative app has not emerged that takes no profit. Is there something like this we should all start using instead?
There isn't much technological innovation in ride-sharing that the FOSS community couldn't solve. I'd love to work in this area.