Ride-sharing + driver-sharing?
 

Ride-sharing offers the potential to liberate potential pedestrians from the responsibility, debts/contracts, and other burdens of car-ownership; but who gets stuck driving the vehicles?

Ride-share companies have been accused of exploiting drivers, so that raises the question of whether there is some way to liberate drivers from getting stuck driving all the time as a job?

In other words, could pedestrians who use ride-sharing also use an app to 'drive-share' when it's their turn to shoulder that burden?

If so, the problem would be who owns the car. If the ride-share company owned it, it would no longer be ride-sharing. If the vehicle was owned by a third company, say a rental car company or an insurance company or whoever, then riders and drivers could be regulated and scheduled by an independent ride-sharing app.

But would there still be problems if you as a ride-share user with driving privileges was sometimes asked to drive your ride and even pick up other passengers along your route? Would you expect to get paid for driving, or would you accept it as part of the ride-share costs that you had to take the helm once in a while?

And if you had to pay more for the privilege of declining to drive when it was your turn, how much would that privilege be worth to you? I.e. how much extra would you be willing to pay for a ride-share where you are guaranteed a driver who doesn't hop out and leave you as the next driver?

I'm surprised no one has responded to this thread, considering how big Lyft and Uber have been in the news since their IPOs.

Ride-drive-vehicle-share could soon be a thing, where you as a driver/passenger can request a ride and receive the option to drive as one of the ride options.

It could be a segway into autonomous ride-sharing that will be coming in the not-too-distant future.

If vehicles are constantly changing hands between different drivers, though, the question is who will own the vehicles? Could the ride-share companies themselves own the vehicles as share-vehicles, as long as they are not hiring drivers as taxi chauffeurs?

If they did that, could they still contract with private individuals who want to use their own vehicles to provide rides to others without allowing other people to drive their private vehicle?

What about private vehicle owners who are willing to allow other people to drive? Will they be allowed to submit their vehicle for ride-sharing and collect revenues without even staying with the vehicle while it's in use, the way a Youtuber can post a video and collect ad revenue without always being online to interact with whoever is watching?

So many new possibilities are emerging with networking and smart-phone technology. Can you think of still other possibilities for innovation in ride-drive-vehicle-sharing?

Ride sharing is taxi service first of all.

Want rental cars? You can do that too from on the street app activated to the traditional style. That's been done.

Uber is losing $$ and its business model is a failure and predictably so.

Like this?

https://turo.com/

Yes

We used to have a fleet of smart cars here for rent and it was app based and all you had to do was drop it off inside the operational area.

Very little in the auto taxi world is new really.

Everything in this post is political.

With driver-sharing, no one has to be burdened with remaining in the driver seat beyond the ride they're taking in the vehicle.

Why couldn't Uber or Lyft offer ride-seekers the option to drive when accepting ride offers?

The interesting questions, then, are things like whether Uber/Lyft could insure the vehicles for multiple drivers? Or would a separate insurance company have to underwrite the car-sharing aspect of the rider/driver-sharing?

The Uber/Lyft business model is like most other gig economy business models. Uber/Lyft don't have to own cars, insure cars, hire employees, or give employees benefits.

I can't imagine why Uber/Lyft would ever insure cars they don't own, and owning cars would mean that Uber/Lyft would have to put physical skin in the game. Which is against the gig economy business model.

As far as taxi fares driving it can be done but the insurance will destroy the already non existent profits even further.

Everything else you mention HAS ALREADY BEEN DONE.

The Uber/Lyft bisiness model is precisely the same as any courier and most taxi companies have been using for forever with the exception of how the runs are dispatched and even that is no longer any different. The company I used to run for switched to all digital back in 2000.

Uber/Lyft doesn't have to insure the cars but they do when operating and the insurance is a joke. Some courier companies and taxi services go that route as well. Normally the vehicle owner carries the commercial insurance though.

The whole purpose of creating an app-based ride-share platform is to allow people to share rides instead of paying for taxis. Taxis were always overpriced and that provided an incentive to 'save money' by buying and driving your own car.

Now the question is whether and how to share the burden of driving as well as the benefit of riding as a passenger.

- Can a vehicle owner lend his or her car to the next passenger-driver via a ride-share app? If so, how would the ride-share costs/payments get divided between the vehicle owner and driver-passenger?

Example:
If I pick up one or more passengers via a ride-sharing app on the way to my destination in my own car, I get the full amount paid by the app. However, once I leave my own vehicle to another driver-passenger who takes over driving for me, that person would be entitled to a certain ride-discount because they are driving for me, yet I would still be entitled to a certain amount of the proceeds because it is my car they are driving.

No, the purpose was and is to eliminate staff in a front office specifically the need for so many dispatchers

Taxis charge what the market will bear in a sustainable at the time rate. Uber and Lyft etc cost shift much of that burden onto the drivers and tax payers in their at the moment failing attempts to stay in business and try to monopolize the taxi industry.

No one wants to eliminate people. We just want to pay less, which requires cutting costs. Do you want to pay a dispatcher to tell you were to drive in your own car? If so, why would you want to when you are ride-sharing?

Driver-ride-sharing would avoid the whole issue of client-servant in getting a ride. Ride-sharing is already an attempt to do that by allowing people who drive their own vehicles to share rides for compensation. Letting the driver continue to share the vehicle after getting out at his or her destination would further avoid the issue.

But then you could argue that the vehicle owner is getting exploited by not getting paid enough by the auto-makers to operate a car-rental service.

Do you think car rental franchise owners are getting exploited because they're not salaried employees within the automaker corporations of the cars they rent out? Is it a problem that they are independent contractors?

When you contract with Uber or Lyft or any other digital taxi service you already pay to be centrally dispatched. The only dispatcher free taxi services are those which do group dispatch which works fine for 1 to about 10 taxi drivers, after that centralized is the way to go.

Why the tangents?

The thread topic is how to incorporate driver-share into ride-sharing so passengers can also share in the driving and no one has to be stuck driving others around all the time.

Not a tangent it is a response to your statement above. Anyway what you are talking about is car pooling.

The people I know (in my small town) who actually use Uber/Lyft are those who: (1) do not want to or cannot walk, bike, or take transit; (2) do not want to or cannot drive, either because they do not have a license or plan to drink alcohol; and (3) do not have another source for a ride, such as a friend, family member, or coworker.

This generally amounts to people who need to get to and from a destination quickly but cannot drive. Examples include getting to and from work while transit is not running and getting home from bars at closing time (also, when transit is not running). I do not think that someone who just worked an eight hour shift in the service industry would be willing to drive, nor do I think that the bar hoppers should take a turn driving.

There would probably be surge pricing for drivers if no one wanted to or was capable of accepting the driving responsibility at a given moment.

That's why I asked early in the thread how much extra you'd be willing to pay for a ride-share with the privilege of rejecting the call to drive when the app asked you to.

example:
There could be five potential rides for you in the area without anyone willing to drive toward your destination, and only one with a driver willing to do it. You might have to pay surge pricing to get that one driver, e.g. because you're drunk, but if you were sober and willing to take over the wheel, you could take one of the other five vehicles and pick up passengers along the way, which would reduce your ride cost and probably earn you some credit/pay.

You would be able to further increase your pay if you were willing to go out of your way and take a little extra time to pick up more passengers. Likewise, they would have to pay more because of you having to go out of your way to pick them up.

The interesting thing would be to design the logical analysis to pair driver-passengers with passengers in a way that transfers the vehicle to the next driver-passenger at the optimum moment. You would get an instruction to allow the next passenger to take over the wheel and you would move to a passenger seat and continue on as a passenger so that the new driver could let you out at your stop and continue on to the next passenger seamlessly.

It would add dynamism to ride-sharing to coordinate driver-switches in this way, and it would work out in everyone's benefit because drivers would be sharing the burden of driving the ride-share vehicle instead of putting that burden on a single driver and having to pay them more because they are only driving and not also riding to a destination.

Or you could just make a friend who has a truck/SUV and doesn't mind giving you rides. Been there and done it.

Or the dreamer could wake up and try to figure out how to get places without resorting to fantasy scenarios that are DOA if/when he opens his eyes.

Given that in Wipekitty's example, we're mainly talking about transportation after 11 pm, all the driving and switching drivers etc. is happening in the early part of the night ... midnight, 1 am, 2 am, etc.

Given that there are often price increases at night, say by 1.5 (low estimate) ... that brings the price to what we'd pay for a taxi. Without the hassle of driving, handing off the car, being stuck out wherever at 3 am, etc.



This is an inefficient solution for a problem that doesn't exist.

Really it depends on whether the vehicles used for driver-ride sharing are privately owned and/or whether the owner has to accompany the car or whether the car can be used while the owner sleeps (whether that owner is a private individual or corporate owner).

If ridership goes down at night, then there would be more vehicles available that are not being used. If you can pick one up and drive it to your destination and park it and leave it for someone else to pick up in the morning, that would basically just be like a dockless car-share.

If you're drunk and there's no one to drive for you, you would probably just have to pay taxi rates because you're paying for someone else's utter inconvenience, as you say.

Who said reality is real? Maybe it's a filmstrip and will end when the record goes BEEP!

If reality wasn't real, then why would it be called, 'reality?'

Ponder that for a while :geek:

Yeah, I'm just going to leave my $20-$50K investment that I insure, maintain, and use in the hands of joe blow to drive and leave unsecured at the crack house he drove to.
After he used it rob a convenience store and hit a curb. But hey, we drive shared and reduced our carbon footprint

With the right insurances, it can be profitable.

Think of rental car companies: they rent out cars to people for anything. You could drive a rental car to crack houses, through mud pits, transport corpses, or whatever and you and your insurance would just get billed for the damages, which would make the rental company and its partners more money.

Really this is a big problem with modern economies, i.e. that more money can be made off destruction and waste than off sound, efficient, and prudent non-wasteful consumer/business activities; but I don't see why ride-sharing would benefit any less from such abuses than rental car companies and automakers and parts-suppliers more generally do.

The big question is for ride-share users to also share the driving, who has to own and insure the vehicles? Can it be done by individual users, or would there have to be an external company, like a rental car company or a car-share company that provides and insures the vehicles while the ride-share apps just cooridinate rides/drives among users?