100%

American cabs fucked passengers. Gig companies fucked drivers.

I recently said “fuck it, I’ll take a cab from the airport cab pool.” It was like immediately time traveling to a differently shitty moment in history. The cab smelled like it was made out of Newport filters and ass, and when we got to my home, the guy refused to take a credit or debit card.

Dude was picking up people from the international terminal, where they were often landing without local currency, then he would tack on a trip to the bank, with the meter running.

He had Master and Visa card stickers on his car.

The apps weren't profitable. They sold rides for less than it cost them, which killed the industry. That's what all disruptive companies do, sell for an unprofitable price and have investor money make up the difference.

Taxi companies could not compete. How could they? It didn't matter if they were good or bad. There was no chance to compete because they all went out of business.

Again, the apps didn't win because they were better, it's because they didn't allow competition. In a sane world they would have had to have made a profit, and the taxi companies would have made their own app, and things would be pretty much equal across the board. But that never happened.

Exactly. If you’re in NYC or SF, fine, just hail one. If you’re anywhere else you’re gonna wait 1.5 hours.

For the areas it covers, Minneapolis has a pretty good public transit.

They have to pay hundreds of millions a year bribing politicians across the world!

I've always thought that a smart contract system on a blockchain like Ethereum could make for a really good ride share app that's focused on the drivers running their own independent business.

It would solve the payments problem. It could also automate the requesting and accepting a ride.

The drivers could post their own rates

The contract could take a small fee out of the ride fare to help fund the devs.

And with the latest Ethereum upgrade this week, you could transact for pennies.

I'm still not sure how decentralized trust would work though, and how you'd get licensed.

Real time map updates might be a problem too, but maybe the driver app and rider app could find each other and open a websocket and stream GPS locations peer to peer instead of via any centralized server? This part might be more janky at first vs a central service.

Edit: and the service could run on a stable coin so people aren't subject to volatility

Edit: just thinking on the GPS... if the driver publicly posts a web socket/api address you can connect to peer to peer, what if it only accepts connections by the current active ride. So the riders wallet signs the app request to open the socket and then the two parties can start sharing their location? That way it only gets shared to the appropriate people. But if a driver wants to know where before accepting, the rider would need to publicly post the where, so maybe you only post to 2mile radius or something, and the actual address gets done peer to peer if accepted?

Edit: also the contracts are open source, it's the front ends that would be the developers business, and technically anyone could copy the smart contracts and write their own front end to them, and if it took off, I imagine people would eventually write an open source front end as well. It'd help keep costs down as if you were too uncompetitive someone else could enter.

Edit: and if it was just an open source front end, no city would be able to stop it. It'd be forever accessible where someone could post they are available to pick up, and anyone could post they need a ride. Trust wouldn't even need to be solved by this specifically, trust is a problem other people/business can solve and it just hooks into this.

This is the beauty of self employment. As I said in a previous comment, I'm a driver and one of the apps I work along with my own service give me the ability and freedom to raise my own rates when I feel the need. Truth is though, as it stands, most uber and lyft drivers could make more than enough if the companies were forced to pass on a percentage instead of low balling offers. Very rough math says they could pass on a fixed 80% and charge the rider whatever they feel like at any point in time. This would give them more enough profit along with covering all costs. They won't do this because they are greedy and states/cities won't make them do it because they are stuck in the hourly mindset when most IC work is not hourly. This job is all about miles. Watch dead and wasted time of course but it's not all about the hourly.