Really curious why such an option still doesnt exist:
"I am driving from Soma to Palo Alto so just notify me about the customers trying to do the same thing"
Lyft shouldn't be anyone's full time or part time job. In my opinion that's the only way they can co-exist with Uber.
This exactly BlaBlaCar's* thing...unfortunately they have no plans to come to the U.S. I live in NYC and unlike most people here I have my own car. I often drive to nearby cities to visit friends. I would LOVE to have a widely used service like this, I'm so jealous to see, for example, BlaBlaCar's listings for people looking to share a ride from Paris to Lyon this Friday evening.
Lyft Line already does this, and it's available in NYC. I'm not sure if it works between cities, but within the NYC metro area you should be fine.
Unfortunately I'm not optimistic about a similar service doing well in North America. The main advantage BlaBlaCar has in Europe is geography. Cities in North America are more scattered. Also, French culture is much more open to hitchhiking, which BlaBlaCar feels like a natural extension to. And European road tolls are far more expensive than in North America, giving drivers a much larger incentive to take some ridesharers with them. For example, on a long weekend roadtrip along the Cote d'Azur my French friend and I racked up close to 200 Euros in tolls, but happily made almost half of that back by picking up BlaBlaCar passengers at various convenient points along the way.
This works when one destination has strong mass transit connections (e.g. the casual carpooling over the SF Bay Bridge), but without that, pairing seems hard.
If I'm going from X to Y, what are the odds that there will be another person traveling along this route that within the next M minutes will be near X? Note that M must be small to encourage me not to use alternative options.
If there's not enough drivers, passengers stop using it. Not enough passengers.. drivers stop using it. Because of the need for both source and destination alignment, unlike the taxi which just needs source alignment, much larger critical mass is needed for this to be useful.
It would be nice if this integrated with an always-on app while driving, like Google Maps[0], so as a driver you could always be aware of nearby opportunities to pick up passengers going your way. I think it would be more difficult for passengers -- because of the possibility a driver could cancel or lollygag, a 15 minute wait is a huge investment that could result in you still having to find alternative transportation.
[0] This was very uncomfortable at first as the son of a UPS driver, someone who's usually able to find a place again after going there just once, but now I navigate with Google Maps for routine trips in the Bay Area just to find shortcuts around traffic. I'd imagine integrating with onboard navigation would make this even easier for most drivers with newer cars.
> "I am driving from Soma to Palo Alto so just notify me about the customers trying to do the same thing"
This concept was discussed a couple of weeks ago in the Stratechery article Uber 2.0: Human Self-Driving Cars[0].
0: https://stratechery.com/2015/uber-2-0-human-self-driving-car...
They should accept being a tenth the size of Uber, and having a meaningful business, instead of trying to compete head-on with Uber and destroying their potential. Investors of course don't like that premise, as a $3 or $5 billion market cap won't cut it after taking a billion dollars in VC.