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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

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

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>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.

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.

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...

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.

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