The only problem here is that this would limit the usefulness of the service. The most likely end game for this feature is that most downtown areas have a bunch of drivers fenced in, and nobody can find a ride to or from those areas. There are a ton of people in suburbs that would like to not drive into or out of the downtown in my area, and we use services like Uber/Lyft to avoid this. If the drivers in our area confined themselves to just near the downtown, we would have to drive there either way, and so the service becomes useless to us.

If the service instead allowed drivers to designate a "home zone" where the base price is payed, and then trips to successive neighboring zones have a multiplier applied, this would probably work better.

I can see some abuse here. If I live in a suburb, set it as my home zone, then just work downtown.

Perhaps limit the "home area" designation at the end of the day. So before someone is "ending" their day, they can click a button and service only in their home area.

That way, the usefulness of the service is not compromised as much.

Lyft and Uber both have this functionality (enter a destination and get matched with someone on the way), and I believe it is capped at 2x per day.

There couldn't possibly be any PR consequences if they did that. I mean, it's not like redlining at all.

I think it'd be reasonable to only allow use of that feature when heading home at the end of a shift. Could enforce it by (for example) refusing to allow the person to sign back into the app as a driver for an hour after getting home or something.

It should just be "miles around my home address" when you start driving from home.