Can a Worker-Owned App Pull Drivers from Uber and Lyft? | Hacker News Reader

Can a Worker-Owned App Pull Drivers from Uber and Lyft?

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41 pointspseudolus25 comments

I think it could. In Baltimore there is a culture surrounded by giving cheap economical rides. It's called "hacking" or "catching a hack" https://afro.com/the-anatomy-of-a-hack/ .

I think an app that just allowed people to be their own boss and hail their own rides could easily upend uber or lyft. If the idea of the app is to empower people to be their own bosses. Let people set their own rates. Maybe charge a flat rate of $0.25 per ride. Drivers would benefit and so would passengers.

Obviously hacking/hitchhiking can be dangerous so the driver/passenger identity system would still need to be addressed.

How? Uber loses money on every ride, doesn't it? Are you going to get VC money for a co-op?

Some of the ride cost is VC subsidy. Some of the ride expense is Uber corporate (thousands of programmers, pay for officers, managers, building rent, etc).

Do we know which is greater? Maybe there is room for an app with low overhead to compete.

I'm supportive of the co-op idea, but my bet would be that the drivers don't matter nearly as much as users. So unless it can compete on a UX level with the convenience and branding of the VC-backed options it's not going to succeed.

I agree, although the flipside is cheaper rides that can be marketed as going to local drivers.

With any app, your driver is going to be local enough to be picking you up.

A larger cut is retained by a distant middleman.

Uber makes money on rides in nature markets, it’s losses are from investing in new markets and businesses.

Depends on the market. Uber makes money on rides in established urban areas, ie look at the NY or LA numbers.

I think they mean a 25¢ fee to the platform for matchmaking; you’d pay the driver too.

cafard is saying that it’s not likely possible to get users without subsidizing each ride

The drivers should be the customer, who search out the matching company together as one big negotiating block. But the US has made it illegal unless they all work for someone other than themselves, along with making other main tools of unionization illegal, like secondary strikes.

As a non-US citizen, I have 3 questions:

1. WTF

2. Is it even enforceable?

3. Does anybody know recent examples?

Apps and the associated infrastructure (driver background checks, payments processing, customer support, etc.) are much harder to build than they look. I'm willing to bet against a worker-owned app taking >= 10% of Uber and Lyft market-share in >= 10 mid-size American cities.

To compete with apps like Uber and Lyft you have to continuously add features , scale and be reliable. While producing an app similar in function to Uber is quite possible , I think the biggest hurdle comes from adoption of the app and continuous iteration at the speed of Uber.

What novel software features have Uber and Lyft added in the last two years?

I would imagine the vast majority of the work is in mapping metadata/annotations and functions to customize the features of a route based on that data.

Airports would be the first example that comes to mind. Guiding both driver and passenger to the designated pickup location, which might be separate from the normal passenger loading/unloading areas.

But throughout big cities you will have designated taxi/ride share POIs that need to be coded.

I’m sure the pricing algorithm is also quite complex.

It’s an easy mistake to make to look at something from the outside and assume the details are all pretty simple.

Both of those are important improvements, and the first is more of a life-long process than a task.

A coop ride-sharing app would benefit from a "wiki-map" like OpenStreetMaps which can be directly added edited by the drivers, whose pockets will see more money if maps were better, and riders who will spend less money if maps were better.

The pricing algorithm, I can see, will require a lot of advanced mathematics, and will involve a lot of politics, which might make it hard for a democratic organization to function. The politics comes from the fact that different pricing algorithm will have different losers and winners.

I think good UberPool functionality is one. The routing for that is a lot harder technologically and prepandemic I did a lot of Uber pool rides, since in many cases I wasn't in a hurry and it was quite a bit cheaper.

Pooling goes well with the ethos of coop ride-sharing.

The success of a coop ride-sharing app seems to depend a lot on how much open-source work will programmers be willing to volunteer to the project.

I can’t imagine it would work as mostly volunteer work, the amount of code that needs to be written is just too high.

An alternative is to simply offer cheaper rides. But drivers aren't going to join this if they make less money than with Uber/Lyft.

Huh!!!?

It could happen, but only after the cash fountain at Uber has dried up.

If it seems to be happening why throw money away by investing in Uber? A fair trade alternative they can't buy out is not going to allow them profit until they have a scale advantage that doesn't exist in car services. I.e. they are throwing money away until they have a pure AI fleet and then a new fleet from an automaker has no such debts.

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