Lyft Carpool: A New Way to Commute

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If they wanted/needed to pay a higher amount, could Lyft get around this by paying the driver two fees - a first constrained one to skirt the insurance rules and then a "separate" fee for another component such as advertising or data provision or something else plausible but arbitrary?

I'm the CPO and Co-Founder of Scoop automated carpooling - www.takescoop.com. I wanted to jump in with a few thoughts.

It's exciting to see one of the ridesharing/ride-hailing companies focus their attention on where the pain is still high - the commute. 100M Americans still wake up everyday, grab their keys, and get in their car to drive to work. On average, that drive lasts at least 25 minutes.

The negative impact of driving alone is enormous - congestion in our communities, $250B out of our pockets every year, and a huge toll on the environment. Autonomous vehicles, hyperloops, or whatever the future has in store might change this - but not for a while.

So, carpooling is obviously something I've spent a lot of time thinking about - and I think Lyft is doing some smart things here. I like the Rider scheduling buckets. We do something similar with Scoop - every trip is scheduled with "time slots" that help align Rider and Drivers' schedules.

And of course, Lyft's availability around the Bay Area is nice. For Scoop, we really focus on partnering with employers and 511 (https://carpool.511.org/) to strategically open "routes" into different Bay Area cities. We do this carefully, to ensure that commuters can really rely on their local Scoop community for a carpool every single day.

There are also some important ways that carpooling is really different from ride-hailing, and it'll be interesting to see how Lyft, Uber, etc. address that. For example, who you go with really matters. 45 minutes in a car isn't the same as 10. How you get home really matters too. In the case of no carpool, a regular Lyft or Uber with surge-pricing will make for an unhappy commuter.

Our team of 13 works really hard every day to try to take cars off the road, and are excited by anyone who wants to try to do that too. To that end, we just opened up our newest route today to tackle congestion in a new community. Starting today, you can schedule commute trips with Scoop into Palo Alto. All trips to Palo Alto are just $1 - sponsored by the Palo Alto TMA and Stanford Research Park. And we're excited to have great partners like the Palo Alto Chamber of Commerce and companies like Tesla, Palantir and HP.

PS: If you do want to try to help, we're hiring! Email us at jobs@takescoop.com or visit https://angel.co/takescoop/jobs.

Are you describing your own comment?

That's very meta!

A serious question to everyone complaining about uninsured drivers: do you ask your friends for proof of insurance before getting in their cars as passengers?

Do any insurance companies sell passenger insurance to cover accidents when you're the passenger in a car with an underinsured driver?