Hacker News Reader

> The same thing that happens in the non-Waze case: you kick them out, call the police, get mugged etc.

It's not so simple. Normally people, at least in cities, rarely hitchhike or take up hitchhikers. The goal here is to make it acceptable, and naturally greatly increase the frequency this is happening. This can be reasonably taken as an endorsement by Google to the driver/passenger, because it is -- they want this to happen more often, and are essentially saying "it's OK to hitchhike through our app". This means that they can reasonably be seen as taking part in the entire transaction and assuming some portion of the liability.

Read up on DC slug lines. We are talking 10,000's of people doing this daily with very minor government support for the last 15+ years. Mostly awareness and signage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slugging

>In the San Francisco Bay Area, with the third-busiest rush hour,[3] casual carpooling occurs on Interstate 80 between the East Bay and San Francisco. As of 1998, 8,000 to 9,000 people slugged in San Francisco daily.[5] However, after bridge tolls were levied on carpool vehicles in 2010, casual carpooling saw a significant decline and etiquette became more uncertain

Woah boy I have racked up so many toll violations, I just assumed I didn't have to pay a toll for HOV. Wonder why they haven't mailed them through?

Smaller toll but still a toll. Do you not have a fastrak. I can't understand how anyone in the bay area who drives doesn't have a fastrak it saves so much time. You don't even need to keep it with you just register the license plate with the website.

I don't have a fastrak because I falsely assumed that HOV always has free tolls (except at the Bay Bridge), and I drive a motorcycle.

I was reading an article about 10 years ago about this ride-sharing in the DC metro area. We discussed how a smartphone app could make all this much easier and smoother. We didn't follow up on it back then...

It wasn't (and won't likely to be) the only big missed opportunity in my life.

Survivorship bias makes us forget about the other dozens of "taxi/carpooling apps" that did not succeed.

"The Upstarts" [0] talks about some of those.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Upstarts-Airbnb-Companies-Silicon-Cha...

To your benefit - it's not as easy as to take a few weekends and to code an ride-sharing app to app store.

Lots more business planning and resources are required to pull it off.

I have to think that putting it into an app is meant to encourage people who would otherwise never do this to do so -- the same way people happily use Uber who would never dream of using a gypsy cab under normal circumstances (and passengers then get upset/surprised/complain if Uber doesn't satisfy the expectations their implicit endorsement creates).

It's been happening in Houston for 15+ years, too. I suspect any city with decent HOV lanes and bad traffic has slug lines.

I think it's more like 40+ years, ever since the HOV lane went in.

"In practice, slugging involves the creation of free, unofficial ad hoc carpool networks"

Unofficial is the operative word here.

"Slugging"

What a charming name.

/s

You are pushing the argument a bit by assuming that people will treat it as something different than hitchhiking simply because it's via an app and in-city. There is no reason to asume that - but I do agree that false advertising from Google and failure to properly inform the users of the risks could expose Google to such a liability. The answer is not to add customer support, but to be honest with the users regarding the risks- and make large commissions in the process.

I think that people will almost certainly treat it as something different than hitchhiking, and Google wants them to. In fact, the service depends on it, because if people treated it the same, it would happen at the same frequency as it happens today -- which is hardly at all -- and the service will fail.

I think you're overestimating how much people can and do rely on Uber support when something goes wrong in an UberPool.

And underestimate people's willingness assume all the risks with carpooling with a stranger. I see people lined up for a shared carpool to the DC suburbs every day.

I contact Lyft and Uber support multiple times a year for various reasons, and I barely even use Line/Pool.

Shit happens. If a company is acting as facilitator and money-handler, they are going to get a lot of customer queries, and they are going to alienate most of them if they aren't prepared for it.

Do they do something more than give you a full or partial refund after the fact? I think Google can handle that too.

> You are pushing the argument a bit by assuming that people will treat it as something different than hitchhiking simply because it's via an app and in-city.

Are you suggesting that Google will market this as "it's just like hitchhiking, and is no different, don't @ me"?

> There is no reason to asume that

Sure there is, the main one being a public reputation for your prospective hitchhiker that you can check before deciding to pick them up.

"Casual Carpooling" at least used to be popular - you can read about it here: http://sfcasualcarpool.com/

Originally, for the East Bay to San Francisco trips, cash would not exchange hands because the Bay Bridge toll was waived for carpools. Now that the carpool toll is $2.50, my understanding is that it's a little more awkward.

it's still very popular, with a suggested donation of $1 per passenger. not awkward at all (I take it almost every day)

You are assuming hitchhiking is unsafe. It may be less safe than other forms of transportation, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's especially unsafe. News outlets love stories about strangers abducting children because of how they draw eyeballs, but that happens to be extremely rare. But the anecdotal examples make you overestimate the risk of it.

And this is safer than hitch-hiking. The vast majority of people planning on assaulting strangers dont want to leave electronic trails so they can be easily found.

I somewhat recently learned about the propaganda from the FBI in the 60's and 70's to discourage hitchhiking. (possibly a covert assault on civil rights protesters hitching to rallies) It's easy to be scared of failure, suffering or what can go wrong... but not everyone is excited about what could go right.

Ultimately, I believe a big reason why hitchhiking is not very prevalent is that both the cost of air travel and vehicle ownership has gone down significantly over time. (adjusted for inflation)

> I somewhat recently learned about the propaganda from the FBI in the 60's and 70's to discourage hitchhiking.

Would love to read more about that... Got anything trustworthy?

I think the point is: As long as the person is with you, they share the fuel cost. You already decided to use a car, so you're driving, but the other person is now able to split the cost with you and hitch a ride.

Unfortunately the reality of the situation is: Even with Uber / Lyft there are instances of groping and rape. Once you are in someone's car they have power over you. They don't have to stop. They can threaten to crash the car, etc. And without any vetting this is a risky move.

This can absolutely not survive without some sort of support.

While others say "people already hitchhike" the truth is yes, and there's no liable company so people get paranoid and such. This app will enable a bigger scale which causes more issues.

> Normally people, at least in cities, rarely hitchhike or take up hitchhikers.

Hitchhiking is also illegal in most states.

Speaking as a former hitchhiker who used it to travel through 39 states, it's actually legal almost everywhere. What is illegal is to stand in the path of travel of a roadway, and in some locations standing on the shoulder is also illegal. But on a sidewalk, onramp, etc, as long as you're not physically in the road, it's almost always ok.

Some exceptions being Utah, Delaware, New Jersey, and maybe another, where you're specifically banned from soliciting rides using signage.

Sadly, the best resource for seeing what the laws are in each state was digihitch.com, which went down in 2014, I believe when the founder passed. Quite sad, they had pamphlets for every state with relevant laws written down -- it came in handy a few times when police stopped me. They were always respectful, but I did have to clarify the laws a few times, since it's clear if read, but not widely understood.

are you looking for this: https://web.archive.org/web/20140220034659/http://www.digihi...

No.

Hitchhiking is technically illegal in 4 states and rarely enforced even there.

http://hitchwiki.org/en/United_States_of_America#Police.2FLa...

I'd love to hear the justification for this.

I encourage you to read the reviews on the Waze app. "User keeps sending me lewd messages and can still see my trips even though I blocked him" "the system automatically deactivated my account and I couldn't contact anyone".

Sure it's early days and these hiccups will be reduced. But they'll never completely go away and you need human support to resolve these situations. Better filters and software intelligence will help, but they won't be trained enough or effective for a long time.

Implementing proper features to block a user is the first thing a social app needs to get right. Esp if you can physically track users. That's basically an invitation for stalkers.

> The pure software world exists from Google's perspective, they provide zero support and then it's just a matter of individual choice if you want to use the service or not.

This is something only an engineer would say. In the real world, once you provide a service, you absolutely are on the hook— both ethically and in the mind of the average consumer— for providing some level of service when it goes wrong. “Don’t like, don’t use” is not an acceptable answer, especially in a business like this where outcomes like robbery, rape, etc. are all possible.

> once you provide a service, you absolutely are on the hook— both ethically and in the mind of the average consumer— for providing some level of service when it goes wrong.

The moral and legal liability has precise limits. No software application or payment service could be ever expected to prevent any and all criminal activity in relation to it's use. Google is on the hook, but to a more much limited extent than you suggest, namely they need to do their due diligence in providing a safe service, as far as it's reasonably expected, and inform the users as to the limitations of the service and that the other participants are not endorsed or vetted by Google. That is a level of risk and limited liability they can legally offer, because the much riskier anonymous hitchiking is generally legal.

Google is absolutely not responsible for the rapes and muggings perpetrated by users of Adwords or Waze.

>Google is absolutely not responsible for the rapes and muggings perpetrated by users of Adwords or Waze.

If you or a family member used Waze Carpool, and got raped or murdered, are you going to sit there quietly and say "oh well, not Google's fault"?

As a engineer providing a software solution, it's great to sit in an office desk and say "there are precise legal limits", it's exact, precise, formal, and correct. Like a math problem almost. This is the exact line.

But imagine if you used somebody else's service, and you got raped. Or your family member got raped. Are you really going to not sue and let the newspapers know what happened? It's not just 1's and 0s anymore, it becomes a moral/emotional issue.

Could ask the same question to an auto engineer who's relative dies in a car crash. Should he quit his job, should we ban cars?

While auto safety is important, cars save much more lives than they take - and the economic opportunities they enable drastically change the median quality of life in societies where they are used.

In the same way, carsharing is not an enabler of crime, it's much safer than hitchhiking and would be a drastic improvement in the lives of people who are economically dependent of hitchhiking.

A good example is the Highway of Tears murders - in the last 40 years 20 to 40 women disappeared or were found dead hitchhiking the same stretch of highway in Canada. They were typically underprivileged and of aboriginal origins, and lacking other forms of transportation. The vast majority of cases remained unsolved.

Should something like internet carsharing had been in use by a victim, the police would have had acces to a vast trove of forensic data, including their last match to a known Waze user, identified by credit card, phone fingerprint and cell tower and GPS location history, as well as the victims own location trail up to the point where her phone is taken away/shut down. While a determined high tech killer could operate with these constraints, it's orders of magnitude more difficult. A determined killer is by definition unstoppable by any service or company.

Yes but if your relative dies in a car crash, you can sue for damages. And you probably would, even if, say, you signed some kind of safety agreement before buying the car waiving the right to sue.

Just because the law "precisely" says it's not the carmaker's fault, doesn't mean the carmaker is not "on the hook" or share some of the legal burden.

I am not saying that we should ban cars or ban carsharing. I am saying, if you offer carsharing as a software service, and something goes wrong during that service, you are involved legally. It's not a precise "on/off" switch like launching a software product.

They ought to blame the murderer/rapist since people using an app to connect individual consumers aren't employees or customers of said business. They will probably try to blame whomever has the deepest pockets but that doesn't mean that we ought to or that the law will.

Weak legal arguments aside, if Google allows criminals or even just bad drivers/passengers to use the app then people are going to lose their trust in it and stop using it.

Criminals, bad drivers, and bad passengers probably all use casual carpooling opportunities, yet those continue to operate in many urban areas. With even minimal attention to the problem, any app-based solution will have better opportunity to identify and filter out those problems, so while it's a potential issue, I think it's unlikely to be particularly problematic.

If the app is aiming to making carpooling more accessible, you will see an increase in occurrence of these issues.

The point I'm driving at is that it's still a marketplace and it comes with all the same standard hazards that apply to any marketplace. There are disputes and exceptions that have to be managed. Machines are not good at that yet.

Casual carpooling opportunities don't have enormously wealthy corporations behind them.

Setting the support obligation or morality questions aside for a moment (though I'm on the side of "by facilitating and profiting from this, you accept some responsibility for the quality of that facilitation"), that big difference is still critical: suing the operator of a neighborhood carpool mailing list or somesuch has limited yield. Suing Google has potentially massive yield. So a corporation should think about that sort of risk, just like they would the PR risks, etc, of letting it be an unregulated wild west.

Your position sounds a lot like "light or even largely-community-based self-moderation will be enough" and yet platforms like Twitter and Reddit that have attracted some large controversies and PR shitshows even without real money or real physical harm being involved. Heck, "don't read the comments" is standard internet advice to the point of being cliche.

> The same thing that happens in the non-Waze case: you kick them out, call the police, get mugged etc.

If you shift a large enough volume of traffic into that mode of transportation and externalize 'support' to emergency services then you are taking a free ride on a scarce resource. At a minimum there should be a first tier of support within the company offering the service, if only to serve as a mechanism to immediately halt providing the service to or from that particular passenger or driver until the matter has been dealt with.

That's only true if the service is likely to induce behavior that require such intervention - otherwise it's absolutely ok, for example, to call a public ambulance when a taxi customer gets sick, as oposed to arranging private insurance for your customers.

There is no proof ridesharing would induce criminality, quite the contrary, it's a much safer alternative to random hitchhiking.

Waze has some sort of social integration. I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually you could scope things to some extended network.

I’d be happy giving a fellow student or employee of my company a lift, but probably less likely to give random members of the public.

Completely agree with this; not only are you more likely to share a common origin or destination, but it also becomes an opportunity to meet someone new within your network.

> Google can go a long way into making this significantly safer than random pick-up: you can select female only drivers or riders,

So I can choose to ride with only people of my approved gender? What about my approved age ranges? Or races?

> Google can go a long way into making this significantly safer than random pick-up: you can select female only drivers or riders

This specific example will likely never happen. It's such a can of worms, even before you get to people purposefully misrepresenting themselves on their profiles and creeping people out.

> The same thing that happens in the non-Waze case: you kick them out, call the police, get mugged etc.

So how do you keep the bad drivers/passengers from using the app again?

This should be taken care of once we start implementing a people rating system similar to the one seen in Black Mirror's Nosedive:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive

It depends whether you see Waze as a transportation service or not. Many European regulators would see this as a paid transportation service. And then Google has to deal with customers who were not satisfied with any part of the service.

From the site:

"Make a little money" - paid service, maybe even considered a part-time employment

"Get there quicker" - transportation service.

> it's going to need to staff entire buildings with agents if it doesn't want to completely piss off a nascent user base

That part from the original comment explains it though. I'm already pretty pissed at Google for them not being available at all while some music company is adding claims to all my videos. This is just annoying, but being groped by a person that a Google app set me up with would be infinitely worse.

I admittedly haven't had much experience on the other side but would it be possible to use the identity system that AirBnB uses to "vouch" for people?