Ridejoy (YC S11): Make Some Dough On Your Next Roadtrip | Hacker News Reader

Ridejoy (YC S11): Make Some Dough On Your Next Roadtrip

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74 pointsllambda44 comments

I tried it out the other day, and actually found a ride! Not the mention Jason from ridejoy poked me right away for feedback. They're really friendly, and seem attentive! Best of luck :)

Thanks Shenlong! There's almost always someone manning the chat widget (usually me). I'm glad you found a ride!

Best of luck with the app, but the fonts are killing me, man.

Haha - you mean the handwriting one? =)

Yeah, Architects Daughter is, well, anyways. It just went up in price, but I've found The Big Book of Font Combinations to provide some good guidance in relation to font picking. http://bonfx.com/the-big-book-of-font-combinations/

A handful of my friends used this to get rides to burning man. Worked like a charm, and really saved the day.

We've had a few of these types of things up here in America's hat, they seem to end up sued/legislated out of existence by the various transport groups. I know a few of the student unions ended up taking their rideshare boards offline. Shame, they were handy.

I made a ridesharing application(http://www.ridezap.com) this summer! Sadly it hasn't really caught on among my friends.

I really hope this takes off, I feel like there is a true hole for ridesharing in the US. I feel like this is a good application and I feel that they are making rapid progress(I saw large improvements in just a week!). It needs a little more polish and they should be able to catch up with ZimRide(http://www.zimride.com).

Cool concept. Its like a digital solution to hitchiking. I can see how this service would be useful for trips into the valley.

In the UK there's liftshare.com, although I think they do a lot of their business via companies wanting to reduce their carbon footprint by introducing car-sharing schemes for their employees.

Yeah, we've seen people take the enterprise rideshare approach and while that's great way to generate revenue, we're focused on building a company for the long term that really facilitates rideshare to anywhere for anyone.

Interesting. But I'm kinda curios how scrapping craigslist will turnout. Check this for example.

http://www.ridejoy.com/portland

Just out of curiosity, why is it technically illegal for drivers to make a profit on the ride? What's the law and why does it exist?

You probably are then classified as a taxi and need to be licensed...?

I'm also wondering what laws their citing. There was a case in Canada that had to do with public transit laws but I'm curious to know what rules the US has about this.

This is a publication from the California PUC: http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/NR/rdonlyres/42294D2B-412E-466E-A74B-...

Let us specify destinations in terms of Airports. I put in SFO and I got an awkward address instead. Using this for rides to and from airports would be godly, since parking there is often overpriced.

By awkward address, you mean "International Terminal G (EMB), 275 S Airport Blvd, San Francisco, CA 94080, USA"? Just checking. We'll add support for place names at some point. Thanks!

So it's like eRideShare or Ridester, but a bit more Web 2.0?

Yes. But 100x better. =)

Completion could need some work, though. Maybe it's just me, but I'd expect that clicking on one of the origins/destinations when they pop up would select it and quit the dropdown (normal combobox behavior).

This was fixed shortly after your report. Thanks!

What a great idea. I wish them success!

We've had something similar in Slovenia for many years and it's working wonderfully.

Best of luck to you guys! I'll give it a try next time I'm in the US.

There's a bunch of those services in Germany, too. Then again, I think car sharing has been a bit popular in Europe in general, as cars per capita might be a bit lower, gas prices are higher and not everybody has a car suited for longer routes.

(Established players in Germany: http://www.mitfahrzentrale.de/, http://www.mfz.de, http://www.mifaz.de/, http://mitfahrclub.adac.de/, http://www.mitfahrgelegenheit.de/; One new startup I'm aware of: https://www.flinc.org/?l=en)

Wow. That was confusing. I just replied to a Slovenian with a German website and then scrolled down to see yours... Head slightly exploded

when i went to Germany, someone hooked me on to gelegenheit. i thought it was the shit ever since. i would use google translate for the site, then call the drivers asking if they spoke english. They all said 'a little bit' even though 98% were fluent, which must be some kind of German modesty thing. The site seems to have clones or sister sites in most western europe countries as well. I would have expected people in various Eastern european countries to shun these services on safety grounds, so I am surprised that it is big in Slovenia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalifornia

When I think of ridesharing this much more pleasant one comes to mind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Harry_Met_Sally

This seems like AirBnB except with cars. Seems like they might run into the same liability problems.

Of course. Modern startup thinking seems to be "we'll get a fireproof door once the wood one has burnt down".

Only with this one it's not likely to be your possessions like it is with AirBnB, more likely to be you. Imagine the driver taking you down a quiet road to where his friends happen to be waiting.

Also, since you're taking passangers, do you need a taxi licence or liability insurance as a driver taking passangers for payment?

Slovenia has had a service like this for about 6 years and nothing has ever happened to anyone. It's much less of a problem than you'd think.

You can't get a complaint letter from a murder victim.

It's an awesome service among friends though.

What's the service called in Slovenia?

It would become known if anything like that happened methinks. Most likely it would be all over the news as a "Don't meet strangers from the internets! The internets are dangerous omg!"

http://prevozi.org is the service

I'm sure this service would also be an awesome way to make friends. Everyone's a stranger before you get to know them. So maybe it's worth meeting up before getting into a cross-country car ride with them.

Yeah, but doesn't everyone know everyone else in Slovenia to begin with?

Kidding aside, how many people get how many rides via that service a day/month?

Not sure actually, you can ask @gandalfar on twitter.

I lived in Germany from 2009 - 2010 and ridesharing is absolutely huge. I haven't heard of anything happening. I probably used the ridesharing website from 2 to 20x per month (didn't have a car but traveled a lot). This is the one I used: http://mfg24.spiegel.de (the "spiegel" part is actually a major German publication but the rideshare itself is powered by another company). I'm sure chrome will translate it for all you non-germans ;) It's been around for 10+ years

I think it's been around even before the 'net, which is why several sites basically have the same name ("Mitfahrzentrale"). Student organisations and similar groups used to do it for their members or event participants.

I'd say that hitch-hiking isn't that more common than in other countries, but sharing a car for a long trip is. (And yes, dear Americans, I know, a few hundred miles really isn't long…)

What is it with people here assuming people are about to rob them?

Fuck that. Make it so that you have to register your car with plates, then if something happens you know which guy to call the police on.

I have no idea why: http://folksinpublic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/hatchet-...

In the ancestral environment, violence was the main cause of death you could do something about and cars didn't exist. The result is evolved instincts that are wildly irrational in the modern environment.

If you actually stop and think about it for a minute, the probability of the driver taking it into his head to murder you is likely negligible compared to the probability of being killed in a plain ordinary road accident, despite - or because of - the fact that we have no instinctive fear of the latter.

People do give rides all the time :) we're helping people form carpools, in the legal sense. Millions of carpools already happen each day among people with shared destination/interests, and the insurance laws around that are pretty well established and reasonable. (Note that we cap payments at AAA carpool reimbursement rates. You can't start a taxi/limo service.)

As far as safety goes, the key is you're not going to message anyone you feel uncomfortable with. If you login, you can see their photo, age range, work/education history, # of fb connections, and mutual friends. Many people rideshare on Craigslist right now anonymously, and there haven't even been any crazy stories there.

Take a look for yourself, here's a ride: http://www.ridejoy.com/rides/595-portland-to-seattle-on-octo...

We do think about safety a lot and will keep working on helping with that. Drop me a note if you have suggestions on how we can improve. Thanks!

There are lots of little things you can do to avoid liabilities, and it looks like they're putting a lot of thought into that.

I see this as potentially kind of the airbnb of transportation. I'm going to try it out.

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