11–20 of 197 posts
I can see drivers/passengers travelling together for weeks or months at a time. So you'd probably just want to quit Lyft and enter a private arrangement. Is there anything in Lyft's business model to prevent or mitigate this?
http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/29/6000-words-about-a-pink-mus...
I imagine something like this would be a lot easier for municipal governments to swallow, compared to the current "not a cab but yes it's actually a cab" model.
I wonder what this will do the the already established causal carpool for crossing the bay bridge. At the moment, it's free for riders, the benefit for the driver being that they skip the toll. On the upside, I had a friend who was a rider, and had lots of stories of terrible drivers. Once he witnessed the driver hit a person and then drive off, and then drop off my friend. My friend called the police, but I guess wi…
Lyft would probably rate the drivers like they do normally and stop allowing them to drive for the carpool. You can't prevent accidents like that, but you can prevent those people from doing it again with your service fairly easily.
1. To get from the East Bay to SF in the carpool lane you need 2 passengers (3 people total - or a car that only seats two)
2. The East Bay already has a pretty nice system for this called the Casual Carpool which is probably its biggest competition. The Casual Carpool is just a bunch of spots (usually BART Stations) where drivers can stop and pick up a few other passengers to get in the carpool lane across the bridge and usually the passengers chip in a few bucks for the toll. This system is pretty good and works well considering the need for 3 folks in the car to get carpool lane access. The Lyft model is a lot harder to coordinate picking up 3. The biggest issues with Casual Carpool are that there's no revenue for the driver and it's mostly one way (inbound in the morning). The eastbound after work system is not as efficient, there's a common pickup area downtown with stops indicating destinations but it can be hit or miss on whether passengers are there when you're ready to go home.
Long and short of it I think this is a Peninsula solution not really an East Bay to SF one yet.
interesting. didn't lyft start off as zimride which is a carpool app? https://zimride.com/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/29/6000-words-about-a-pink-mus...
I used Zimride when I was moving from Portland to Los Angeles, I picked up some random guy along the way and dropped him off in SFV. Great way to subsidize gas of the moving truck.
After that it seemed like ZimRide went for the University market instead of having total strangers effectively do e-hitchhiking.
Now it seems Enterprise Car Rental bought the company.
"The Carpool Platform is operated by Clara Rides, Inc., not Lyft, Inc. Clara Rides, Inc. is not a Transportation Network Company or a transportation service. Clara Rides and Lyft do not conduct criminal background checks on Carpool Drivers, perform vehicle inspections on vehicles used for Carpool Rides, or provide insurance for Carpool Rides."