Originally Posted by
wipekitty
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.