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Comment by mywittyname | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully Uber/Lyft start a van/bulk transit service. This would help reduce traffic by combining trips while being more efficient than buses because the server can dynamically route the driver to optimize pickups and departures.

Perhaps even adding discounts for riders willing to trek the last mile on foot.

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Then why isn't that being done today? As you increase the number of passengers, the cost of the driver becomes relatively trivial. It seems as if this were a service people were willing to pay for these money-losing companies are missing a significant market opportunity. I know there's UberPool but as far as I can tell it isn't a wildly popular option.

Routing. Turning an efficient set of start > points to a combined path is a complex traveling salesman problem. But this is worse as you need to find multiple such sets from raw data. It's not hard to get some overlap but if you go past 2-3 passengers everyone gets a longer trip.

That's probably true. Plus a lot of people just don't want to share vehicles. At some point, you're basically creating most of the disadvantages of a bus in a smaller vehicle.

> while being more efficient than buses because the server can dynamically route the driver to optimize pickups and departures.

There's a big assumption here that this dynamic routes would actually be more efficient than the simple fixed routes we have now. I'm skeptical.

https://www.lyft.com/shuttle

Only for SF and CHI. I'd love this but I'm not in their zone.

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