At some point I was searching for an open source car pooling service. I realized there weren’t any so I started developing one on my free weekends.
While I haven’t made much progress so far, I have been observing how much as a society we have been relying on route planning software. Also, I cannot overlook the effect of such services on the planet (see Amazon, Uber, and many more).
With all this as a context, I have been asking myself the following questions:
- What would be the impact on society (especially inequality) if there were open source alternatives to such services?
- What would a common core look like? (i.e. what is the WordPress equivalent for transportation/route planning, is OpenStreetMaps enough?)
- What domain specific knowledge would it require to build such a software? (while in university I researched about the travelling salesman problem, anything else?)
- What safety protocols would we need to develop when there is no corporation insuring users? (i.e. if I order something from Amazon and it’s dead on arrival, I get either a refund or a replacement shipped to me for free)
- What’s the proper terminology to describe what I am describing?
Feel free to add any questions of your own. I created this post because I am free this afternoon and I wondered what it would like to discuss this with strangers instead of pondering on my own.
Edit: My free afternoon was taken away by an incident I had to respond to, it’s now late o’clock here, but I will do my best to reply to all you magnificent people.
I can’t speak on any of the others, but a open-source decentralized Uber alternative could actually be extremely competitive. You could basically give drivers 100% of the profits minus hosting costs/development costs (dev might fall away depending on the model). So in effect you either get cheaper prices for consumers or more wages for drives. No middlemen jacking up prices for no reason.
But I don’t think federation works for that. Rather you’d want to build it on top of some open-source decentralized blockchain platform that handles transactions, escrow, ratings, reputation, identity/profile management (you wouldn’t want anonymoud drivers) etc…
Money, ratings, reputation, identity stuff are all better solved with blockchain than with federation in my opinion. You don’t want to have to check the repuation of each instance, every instance might handle ratings differently etc… It would be a mess. Rather you’d want to only be worried about driver reputation.
How you would handle new drivers is an important question, but that’s implementation details.
The problem here is that it still leaves drivers with all the overhead. While it’s good that they’re making all the profit generated, the scalability and reliability aren’t great because of that.
Taxis are a business that particularly benefits from at least minor consolidation. A company with a decent reputation and a handful of cars is likely to have connections with local businesses to get the word out, and they’re also able to absorb vehicle wear and damage while still turning a profit.
If my cab breaks down it gets towed, I grab another cab, and we keep making money. If my own vehicle breaks down doing rideshares, suddenly I have no transportation and no means of income until it’s fixed.
On the customer end, cabs are also a lot safer. You’re riding with someone who’s been vetted, who has a decent driving record and who can pass a background check. They’ve also potentially got a lot more time on the road than someone who’s starting to drive for Uber and hasn’t run into the logistics issues yet. Never mind that they’re probably local and familiar with the area, whereas every single Uber I see around here has out of state plates.
Actual ride sharing, like, independent people using things like bulletin boards to both get to work together at a mutual benefit, is a fantastic practice. But when you try to make it some big service you basically get a half assed replacement for taxis that shift the financial burden onto drivers and cut prices as a result.
Do you have any other taxi related experience or knowledge you would like to share? You seem quite knowledgeable.
Also, do you think local taxi groups/companies/coops could benefit by hosting their own instance in a federated Uber like platform?
That was the reason I started looking for a ride-sharing service in the first place. I was in Larissa, the morning after the Tempi train crash occurred. I was about to ride to Athens with my car and I realized that the only train track of the country was going to be out of order for months (still is). So, I decided to offer my seats for free to anyone interested, I made a post on a fb group about ride-sharing, but by the time someone reached out I had already left.
That’s when I realized that user experience matters, that person was actively looking for a ride when I posted, but they missed my post. So, e-mail notifications was the 2nd feature I developed.
I personally like the way Indrive operates in relation to setting up prices and fees. You can agree on a price with the drivers, like you offer 5$ and they give you they’re offers in return 6 or 7$ and you agree with the price, what i dont like in fact is the usage of google location services (google services) and that it is propietary
I would assume that drivers are hosting their own instance, and they get to decide both (a) how much they charge and (b) what portion of their profits they donate to the devs (especially modifications they need).
I think this is already happening with taxi services. Here in Athens, there are a dozen of services you can call to order a taxi, and people (at least younger generations) are aware of most of them and use them depending on their preferences.
Also, another layer of passenger protection could be the instance they use. Instance admins could filter the driver instances they federate with, allowing only drivers with specific criteria. An issue I see here is that the federation criteria would be much more strict, potentially marginalizing people or making the barrier of entrance more difficult.