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Comment by spIrr | Hacker News Reader

I'll post a comment from ProductHunt, which might give a bit more context to where the founder sees this going, and why cash rides make sense under certain circumstances he designed the app for:

[…] I have gone to the founder's blog and it provides a better understanding of where he sees it going: Uber (and similar apps) will never reach many remote villages, cities and regions around the world (and don't have to), but technology could greatly help the local communities in solving their transportation problems that are as "simple" as getting from point A to point B with no other feasible options available.

For more details, here's the founder's blog on this: https://medium.com/@romanpushkin/how-i-made-uber-like-app-in...

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> technology could greatly help the local communities in solving their transportation problems that are as "simple" as getting from point A to point B with no other feasible options available

In rural communities here in Chile, and also in smaller towns, there is an amazing solution to this called Collectivo. I had never heard of it before arriving, but man it's the greatest thing. It's something in-between a bus and a taxi: a taxi with a predefined route. So if you're on a route, which there are many, you flag down a collectivo as it passes, and since both you and the driver already know where it's going, it'll stop for you even if there are already people in the car.

What makes this amazing is that it's cheap because the route is pre-set, and it's shared, and the driver can just go all day knowing there will be people along the route, and doesn't have to finish one ride before starting another. But meanwhile they'll generally go partially off their route if you request it, and it's not too much of a bother.

Why don't North American rural areas do this? It's a really great way to get around, and makes it so you can live (or at least visit) in rural areas without owning a car.

That's kinda what uber 'pool' and lyft 'line' are. Continual on/off of passengers, but without set routes - you join people close to the car's current route.

Pre-set routes seem distinctly worse. By definition they don't flex to handle new / temporary traffic patterns. Though they do have a super-huge benefit of not needing an app / real-time requests - in some cases that's a requirement.

I think a large benefit that is offers is a better bounded time limit for how long it will take to get to your destination. Pool can take a highly variable amount of time.

Only if it runs on time :) But good point.

yes that's a service readily available in pretty much any developing country in the world.

The not so fun part of it is that if the minivan you are in has nine seats and there are already, say, twenty passengers on it, plus a couple of chickens, the driver will still stop by and collect additional passengers! :)

To be fair I've experienced the same thing with both city buses and taxis.. :) (Having them not stop because they are full that is.)

Minus the chickens of course..

Like buses, you just wait for the next one. So yes, it's a trade-off. Doesn't replace taxis. But it's damn nice when buses aren't readily available, and way more friendly.

I'm more familiar with this model popping up in large developing-world cities that have exceeded the capability of governance to provide transit, e.g. much of Africa is like this, with a host of small independents each running their own routes.

The two main issues they encounter, which are related to being private and decentralized, are that routes collect around a few hubs(e.g. "downtown" or "hospital") that guarantee customers, but get vastly over-serviced without a corresponding cross-town option; and they don't have a dedicated right of way, and end up fighting through the city traffic, sometimes getting stalled for hours by uncontrolled, massively over capacity streets.

There is a lot of room for technology to improve on this - if the governments got into the picture and ran a minibus app, they could track and subsidize those services to formalize it, encourage use and reduce inefficiencies, allowing a transit grid to be formed with little formal capital.

They are known as Dolmuş in Turkey. Essentially van-taxis. There's share taxis [0] in quite a few countries (often from airport to hotels or other high frequency routes). In Germany there's also "Anrufsammeltaxi (AST)" which is essentially a van like taxi-bus that you can call which is loosely bound to the regular bus routes. There's also "Bedarfsgesteuerter Flächenbetrieb" which is basically a bunch of van-taxis cruising around a set area without fixed routes. They usually use sophisticated route optimization, too.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_taxi

Americans don't like sharing.

Rural Americans? I don't have any experience in rural America, but I heard they're pretty friendly ;)

But maybe, yeah..

I think it's actually because the USA has 0.8 cars per person. Why would people carpool or rideshare in a rural area when they've more-than-likely got their own cars?

I grew up from 10 to 18 in a moderately rural area outside of Dallas. We share fine if and when we have to, but for the most part, we don't have to.

I saw a lady walking along the side of a rural road - this was about 12 years ago, so there weren't buses then, and there won't be in the next 12 years either - so I pulled over and asked her where she was going. Turns out she was going to walk, in the summer heat, to a grocery store about 10 miles away.

We shared my car just fine. But I certainly wouldn't go over to a neighbor and ask for a ride to the grocery store if my car was running ok.

I think that's it. Needing to share or using someone else's car is seen as a sign of weakness. OK for an old lady maybe. But a Real American rides their own damn car, and pays for their own damn healthcare...

One of the reasons the US is the second most polluting country in the world, only surpassed by China who has 4 times the population.

If you're a rural family, how will you bring groceries back for the month? What if you need to buy a new bed or sofa? What if you have to visit off the route, or it's just snowed and the collectivo owner doesn't want to bother with the route?

Americans own cars because it's convenient to do many different things with them. If I own a car and my child is sick, I can go get medicine from the all-night pharmacy. I don't want to give up that power just because social planners think I should be happy with a bus or car that I have to plan my life around, not the other way.

A car is good to have, sure, that doesn't mean I need to use mine every day. I've started catching the bus in to work, instead of 45 minutes of battling traffic in the morning I now have an hour and a half to read or draw or code or just nap even. I also have the option to stop in to the city for a meal and a beer on the way home without having to worry about overnight parking, fares are about as much as petrol and the buses here run on LPG which in my eyes is a plus.

This obviously holds less true the further from the city you go but what I'm trying to get at is that you can own a car and still benefit from good public (or in this case, alternate) transport. I still need to keep the car registered and in working order to transport my double bass from time to time and want to keep it that way for all the benefits that you described. What I don't is for me to be shackled to the thing as my only form of transport, much like you don't want to be shackled to a bus timetable.

Just because these services exist, doesn't mean that you need to give up your car to benefit from them (and that's not even going in to benefits provided to people in your community who CAN'T drive).

I lived in Chile as the first cohort in Start-Up Chile. Problem I had with Collectivo's is that I had no idea what their route was. Having the ability to arbitrarily say "I'm here and I want to go here." is very valuable.

I think the commenter's point is that with technology, routes can easily be shared, even commented/collaborated on. Think of it as a more flexible form of public transit rather than Lyft Line / Uber Pool.

This is what "Via" (https://ridewithvia.com/) and they got the idea from the van-busses in Israel and Turkey does here in NYC and some areas.

This sort of thing is common in many countries around the world. When the state doesn't take care of a need the people will.

They have something similar in cities in the US (at least NYC anyway), they're called dollar vans.

Yup now they charge $2 and made them legal after years of illegal pickups. They aren't very safe and stop in the middle of traffic on main avenues. Reckless driving as well. But guess NYC figured they might as well tax them if they werent going to stop -even with fines. I hate them but they are very popular by me in Brooklyn.

Edit- also, they are still not regulated well as I know of someone who was driving one and he does not even have a drivers license.

Yeah this is big in Zambia as well, in the form of privately owned vans. They had so many riders that the government built a big bus terminal for them and bus routes have become established just through free market mechanisms.

Black car drivers do this illegally along bus routes in NYC.

San Francisco has something similar called Chariot. It follows a set route like a bus, but is smaller and much quicker because there are far fewer pick-up and drop-off spots.

Uber is trying to address the Credit Card issues after it noticed that lots of Singaporeans, maids and foreign labor do not have credit cards but still needs the service. They accept cash now. https://www.techinasia.com/uber-cash-payments-singapore

I think it's more because Grab (Uber's competitor in Singapore) has always had the cash option from the start (Grab introduced GrabPay — their credit card option — after) [1], and Uber was trying to match the "feature".

[1] https://vulcanpost.com/171862/grabtaxi-uber-challenge-cashle...

In the Philippines, Uber accepts cash. It has the options UberX, Uber Black, UberPool and UberHop (point-to-point)

In India, Uber accepts cash as well as PayTM, and this has helped adoption.

Wouldn't it be worthwhile to have an Uber membership card or something so they don't have to carry cash.

Most people dont mind caring cash. Personally i prefer it to digitalized closed systems whenever possible.

I think Uber accepts cash in Argetina too. At least in Buenos Aires.

If only there existed a peer-to-peer version of electronic cash that would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution . Maybe one of these days...

You forgot the magic word non-volatile.

Irrelevant. The sole criterion for viability of a currency is acceptance.

I call this false. Got proof?

AZERBAIJAN MANAT

ZAMBIAN KWACHA

BELARUSIAN RUBLE

All currencies, all are as volatile as can be.

And those three markets also accept (and even more highly value) stable currencies. Bring a Euro to any store in Belarus and it'll be accepted at a greater value than the listed exchange rate.

> it'll be accepted at a greater value than the listed exchange rate.

Didn't realize how dire the listing situation was there

:-p

It's simpler than that, currency exchanging costs money. If you're using a foreign currency, then you don't have to pay those fees. If, that currency is even available in your country (in some, using certain countries is prohibited)

Those currencies you list might be volatile vis-a-vis some foreign currency (and thus vis-a-vis "foreign products"), but they're presumably somewhat stable vis-a-vis "domestic products" (you might have inflation, but that typically goes up only, so it's drift, not volatility).

Bitcoin doesn't really have "domestic products", that is things that are denominated in it.

So, low volatility is a quality criterion for money, and those currencies fulfil it (domestically).

In time of war or hyper inflation, domestic currency might get too volatile, and that's when people switch to other money, such a cigarettes or foreign currency.

Hyperinflation needs to go really off the charts for people to switch to other currency.

Source: lived under a hyperinflation of 1900%/year and people did not switch currencies.

That's true, but non-volatility counts for something there. Money classically has three roles, as a medium of exchange, a measure of value, and a store of value; when something's value fluctuates dramatically over time, it's failing to fulfill the second and third roles. Measure of value is unimportant for day-to-day use (although vital for accounting), but store of value is indispensable.

I'm guessing that we're secretly talking about Bitcoin here; I think that what BTC needs is some organization that controls a lot of capital, and is willing to underwrite the value of the bitcoin. Fiat currencies work to the extent that their issuing countries can underwrite their value (by accepting the currency in payment of debts, primarily); precious metals work to the extent that there's non-monetary demand for them (so gold isn't actually very valuable in an apocalypse -- look at prices in the Siege of Sarajevo, discussed in a survivalist blog a few years back). Bitcoin doesn't really have either of these. It's a sort of fiscal hot potato -- good for exchange, certainly, but you wouldn't want to be the last person with all the world's bitcoin if everyone else lost interest in it.

Fiat currencies can also suffer from hyperinflation so the second and third problems are not unique to BTC at all.

Sure, but avoiding hyperinflation is Monetary Policy 101. Most currencies in developed countries have never experienced a hyperinflation and never will because money is created via the fractional reserve banking system as credit for which there is a definite future demand for repayment and taxes denominated in that currency create additional future demand[1]. People are prepared to accept currency because they have future debts and expected future debts denominated in it, and that confidence is boosted because whenever the central bank sees price rises above the level it's prepared to tolerate it steps in to adjust the supply.

The BTC mechanism for attempting price stability on the other hand does the opposite: the supply is designed to grow very steadily, but with no reason whatsoever to believe a stable and sustainable demand for that particular cryptocurrency exists in future.

[1]Hyperinflations occur when the supply of money grows steadily without even bigger growth in future demand obligations, which in practice invariably happens because the government has resorted to printing it to discharge debts and release people from future tax obligations. This actually looks more like a Bitcoin economy (albeit with more potential for the money supply to grow really, really quickly) in that what the government is doing is decoupling supply from demand.

On avoiding hyperinflation, it's certainly true that we know how to do it. For the infamous Weimar hyperinflation, I'd refer you to Adam Fergusson's When Money Dies; what drove the hyperinflation was two things, that the government was unwilling to control its spending (it risked France annexing the Saarland), and that the head of the national bank was poorly educated. When Schacht was brought in, in 1923 (10 years before Hitler; Schacht has a reputation as Hitler's banker, but had never heard of Hitler in '23), he was able to stabilize things pretty quickly: Britain had intervened to rule out a French annexation of the Saarland, and Schacht was more with-it on monetary theory than his predecessor had been.

The risk of Wiemar-like circumstances striking again in the West are basically zero, unless a Wiemar-like perfect storm of defeat and ignorance strikes again; and even then, hyperinflation never lasts long (no one can live under it for long). One woman weathered the Wiemar hyperinflation by selling one link of a gold Rosary chain a day to buy food; a quite modest amount of precious metal is enough to outlast this sort of disaster.

> hyperinflation never lasts long

How about Venezuela then ?

And forgot the year and a half long debate over scaling that has caused an increase in prioritization fees and delays.

The issue often isn't a financial institution to go through; it's the logistics challenge in using an electronic cash system in the first place.

yep.

debit cards are electronic cash.

Seriously, if these people don't have credit cards, and are paid mostly in cash, how do you expect them to have "magic internet money"?

They have smartphones with apps; the step to having an online payment provider is a small one.

Too naive an assumption. I know of certain online payment platforms that have to blacklist certain regions of the world because of fraud detection and the like..

This correlation is not always true, an in emerging markets, this correlation is almost always wrong. Access to Smart phones unfortunately doesn't always mean the availability of banking infrastructure OR the presence of a cashless economy . For example -

- Android phones are dominant in this market, since local manufacturers are able to sell cheap phones without incurring any software development cost.

- Telecommunication sector is heavily privatized in these markets & generally have multiple players offering low cost "pre-paid" services. Recharge stations and mobile stores are pretty ubiquitous - small mom & pop shops double up as resellers of these services , providing last mile coverage.

- On the contrary, Banking infrastructure is so heavily state run. And they don't have the same level of 'ease of access'. So, a lot of people working in the "unorganized sector"(Note: This is an official terminology that governments recognize and use) don't have formal accounts in financial institutions.

- Even if they did, a good number of banks run decade old tools and softwares. Making it all the more difficult to do mobile & online banking .

- And also, most of these economies are not cashless. Culturally and for other reasons,there is more trust on "Paper Cash".

- Finally , just because a person owns a cheap smart phone & ,one cannot assume banking literacy.

In my country most cell phones are on pre-paid plan. You can buy cell phone credits at a gas station, then that credit gets used up as you make calls and send messages.

When the cell phone companies came up with a service to transfer cell phone credits to other users, people started using that as currency. Only problem is each company runs its own proprietary system and there is no way to send credit to a someone who uses a different cell phone company.

If you think about it, phone companies have the best micro-transaction infrastructure on the planet. They are constantly charging people fractions of a penny per second per phone call.

In a few countries like Kenya and Tanzania, this concept is already in use and is extremely widespread. A LOT of people use this system instead of having a bank account. They even use it to pay bills and buy things at stores.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa

Yeah - but they're not talking about mobile money - they're talking about bitcoin.

Yes, but unlike bitcoin, M-Pesa is actually used by average people.

I actually tried starting a company based on that, but when I went to talk to the cell phone providers, one of them candidly explained to them that SMS was their cash cow and that it was essentially free for them, and calls were very cheap related to what the person paid, so it makes no sense for them to enable people to use the credit for other stuff which might get them into trouble later - think lawsuits, regulations, and all the complications of becoming a payment provider.

yeah, i do expect to see one come up in a few years. i'm guessing it'll catch on in africa or asia first, where there are fewer entrenched players.

m-pesa is a good start, at the least.

Sounds like a terrible solution for a place lacking something as financially basic as credit/debit cards.

If only Bitcon had a high enough block size limit to allow more than 1.67 KB/s of transaction data per second. It could be a cryptocurrency, but it can't be Bitcoin.

Cash is also accepted in Mexico ... TJ at least.

In Pakistan, Uber and it's winning competitor (Careem) take Cash. Which is the preferred method here since banking/card is still not so common.

Uber Egypt has cash

I have the option of cash payments here in New Zealand. I think I had that option in the US, too.

The same is true in Argentina. Average citizens don't (can't) have credit cards, but Uber has started accepting cash recently.

In Argentina, the main problem for Uber is that the court ordered the credit card companies to block payments made by local clients to Uber, because of the company not adjusting to local regulations. So, if you don't have a credit card from another country, you can't use the app, and that makes it hard if not impossible for them to build the necessary economy of scale that their kind of operation needs.

Yup, that's also an issue. Mastercard does work though, but considering how few people have credit cards (and even fewer have Mastercard specifically), they're having problems hitting critical mass.

The same thing happens in Guadalajara, Mexico.

One interesting thing an Uber driver told me is that, depending on the area of the city, the majority of people pay with cash or with card. So when he needs cash he drives to a certain area to catch a service.

Was scratching my head why anyone would build an Uber clone but his explanation makes perfect sense. He is tackling a market that Uber might never enter -- rural areas.

Uber (and similar apps) will never reach many remote villages

Here in China you can get long distance ride-sharing to remote locations with the shunfengche service of Dididache. It's very popular, particularly since transportation options to some areas are limited and bus stations are often located in irritatingly obtuse urban peripheral locations.

So we think that they live in remote villages using smartphones but no electronic payment? Is this really a valid use case?

This is very much the case I have seen atlest in India. People have access to cheap smart phones.

Having traveled extensively in Asia, I know and have met LOTS of people that have a smartphone (typically some Chinese android thing), but no credit cards, and sometimes not even a local bank card.

If they're playing a long-tail game like this, would it make accepting credit card payments more difficult? Maybe that's why they don't handle payment?

I know these Stripe-like APIs advertise that building one integration will allow you to send (to driver) and receive (from rider) money in many different currencies, but I have to believe it would be extremely tough to do. Support overhead alone would be large. Is this accurate?

I also imagine that these more remote communities have more of a cash economy than urban communities, but this is a complete guess.

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