That's no longer the case. It was the situation at the beginning, but multiple cab folks have told me that incentives have really reduced in the last four years.

To be fair the last two years were not kind to ride sharing.

I wish people would stop calling it ride sharing, as it implies that one of your buddies is giving you a lift. It's just a marketing term.

Uber and Lyft are (gig economy) cab companies.

Well, shared rides were pretty popular pre-pandemic. Cabs never really did shared rides (at least not legitimately). I pretty much always opted for the shared option whenever I Uber’d or Lyfted.

So how did these work? How did the driver tell where they were coming from and where they were going? And was it worth their time? I can't think sharing your own ride is easy to solve. And no if you add more people when you are professionally driving it is still not ride sharing, it's just bus service at that time.

I think GP is talking about services like Lyft Line where the driver would pick up a second passenger on the way, the route calculated for efficiency.

Yes Lyft Line and Uber Pool. I know Uber pool achieved break even just before the pandemic. It was remarkably cheap and popular in high use areas like major cities. Even if it wasn’t a super profitable product it was a great service that reduced car dependency in America.

True, but the comments were from pre-pandemic times.