FWIW, the oversight of Uber on drivers is part of the success of Uber. I'm not talking about their mistreatments of drivers, but the fact that as a consumer I have reasonable confidence that the driver has been doing a decent job so far and that if I have a problem with the driver, there'd be some consequences through Uber.
It's part of what allowed their success: from unaccountable taxi mafias to a service consumers can trust.
It's far from perfect of course but it's good enough that I'm confident enough using Uber (although I avoid it for other reasons) even in foreign countries. It's probably not impossible to achieve with a co-op, but it seems more difficult
As an aside, this is why I generally trust public transit more whenever it's an option. The worst case scenario is just so much less sinister when there are other people around than it is in a car alone with a stranger.
[0] once in a lyft in seattle, the other in a taxicab in barcelona. figuring I've taken about 100 lifetime solo car rides with strangers which is probably an overestimate.
How would uber know? They can’t unless someone reports the driver or gives them a poor rating.
This is my biggest problem with taxi service in the past. Unless they behave criminally towards you and you can go to police, you were at their mercy. Any cost had to be accepted, no idea how much it would cost upfront.
There were whole scam rings around that in some parts of Europe, taking foreign customers via very elongated roads to destination. Or a story from a colleague - taxi driver in Paris literally threw out a customer in the middle of highway since he didn't like his personal political views on famous french protests. In normal situation that would mean the taxi guy losing his 200k euro medallion, in reality of course nothing, zilch, nada.
Which is a surprising viewpoint for those of us who don't have the safety concerns others may have but when you think about it, it makes complete sense.
Let me tell you about taxi cabs.
Essentially Taxi drivers are the random strangers over the apps with ratings and reviews from other riders showing clearly.
Instead, I do get comfort in knowing that there is a database timestamped entry linking myself with an Uber driver identifier. Should something happen, I could theoretically complain/give a lead so investigators can locate my murdered body. Random cab is more anonymous and feels more dangerous in unfamiliar territory.
Everyone hated taxis because they were so unreliable and unaccountable for scamming you outside of a few dense cities like NY.
They use uber because uber killed anything else. That was the entire point of the ride price subsidies.
The idea is that drivers pay a flat fee per month and get to keep the entirety of the fare. I used it for a while but my desire to get somewhere fast outweighed my disdain for Uber as middleman. Eventually I went back to Uber/Lyft due to long wait times and unreliable pickups.
It is a lot more like "some guy giving you a ride" instead of a car service. My buddy initially pitched it to me as a cheap alternative to Uber for drivers that were banned from Uber. It is nice that they don't have surge pricing. Empower is somewhere in between the convenience and price of Uber and public transportation.
While it's availablity is very good, there are three competitors (one of which is uber) with better, more reliable availability so it's tough competition.
I think Uber verifies driver quality/qualifications and vehicle roadworthy-ness?
And there are tons of government systems you need to get data from. And some counties require in-person visit to obtain court records. And you need those records to make valid assessments.
That’s just what i could think of off the top of my head and i’m not a product manager at uber. Things are NEVER as simple as they initially seem.
Other thoughts:
- at uber’s scale, payment processing alone likely takes up quite a bit of compute server side. You could outsource this to a 3rd party, but it’s still an expense as you scale.
- how would a decentralized system work if something goes wrong during the ride? who does the customer call? Drunk driver, attempted rape, etc. list of things that can go wrong is long.
- your platform/app would need to be smart enough to know where all the “proper” ride share pickup spots are at every airport. Not trivial!
- how would you offer a feature to “reserve a ride” like uber does, if you only build an app that can find “nearby drivers”?
food for thought. :) All im pointing out is this kind of product needs to be a platform and is likely not cheap to run. It’s not 90% client side. Unless you literally just want to reinvent the taxi concept, in which case maybe the 90% client side approach is feasible.
My guess is the real difficult part is maintenance and server costs. It's probably pretty expensive today run
And plenty of competitors have popped up. Any time you travel outside of the US you need to use the local app. Didi, gojek, grab
For as much hate as they receive, I'm not sure why a driver-owned cooperative app has not emerged that takes no profit. Is there something like this we should all start using instead?
There isn't much technological innovation in ride-sharing that the FOSS community couldn't solve. I'd love to work in this area.