Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Waze Carpool

waze.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 406 posts

Re: Waze Carpool

#221

Post by eli »

BookmarkSaver wrote: post #194
eli wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're overestimating how much people can and do rely on Uber support when something goes wrong in an UberPool. And underestimate people's willingness assume all the risks with carpooling with a stranger. I see people lined up for a shared carpool to the DC suburbs every day.

I contact Lyft and Uber support multiple times a year for various reasons, and I barely even use Line/Pool. Shit happens. If a company is acting as facilitator and money-handler, they are going to get a lot of customer queries, and they are going to alienate most of them if they aren't prepared for it.

Do they do something more than give you a full or partial refund after the fact? I think Google can handle that too.

Re: Waze Carpool

#222

Post by zamalek »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #54
cornholio wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike Uber, they appear to talk about a real carsharing system, as opposed to a taxi service with a lower entry barrier. The prices will be much lower since we are talking about the marginal cost of adding another passenger to an already happening trip - and with full info on where people are going, Waze effectively has an endless supply of trips that are happening, it's just a matter of displaying a pop-up "Hey, Al…

You just described the pure software world solution. What happens when the commuter I pick up vomits in my car? Or steals something from my car? What happens if I get picked up by a person who changes their mind about where they're going? Or decide to take an unplanned detour to go to the store, or back home to grab the laptop they forgot, or to score some heroin? What happens when the driver gropes me? Or I grope th…

For these reasons I would seriously like to see is a carpooling system for regular trips, e.g. to and back from work. Intuitively, at least for me, that has fewer risks.

Re: Waze Carpool

#224

Post by majormajor »

dragonwriter wrote: post #190
debaserab2 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weak legal arguments aside, if Google allows criminals or even just bad drivers/passengers to use the app then people are going to lose their trust in it and stop using it.

Criminals, bad drivers, and bad passengers probably all use casual carpooling opportunities, yet those continue to operate in many urban areas. With even minimal attention to the problem, any app-based solution will have better opportunity to identify and filter out those problems, so while it's a potential issue, I think it's unlikely to be particularly problematic.

Casual carpooling opportunities don't have enormously wealthy corporations behind them.

Setting the support obligation or morality questions aside for a moment (though I'm on the side of "by facilitating and profiting from this, you accept some responsibility for the quality of that facilitation"), that big difference is still critical: suing the operator of a neighborhood carpool mailing list or somesuch has limited yield. Suing Google has potentially massive yield. So a corporation should think about that sort of risk, just like they would the PR risks, etc, of letting it be an unregulated wild west.

Your position sounds a lot like "light or even largely-community-based self-moderation will be enough" and yet platforms like Twitter and Reddit that have attracted some large controversies and PR shitshows even without real money or real physical harm being involved. Heck, "don't read the comments" is standard internet advice to the point of being cliche.

Re: Waze Carpool

#225

Post by nugi »

ethbro wrote: post #143
fnbr wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. I've had a number of bad experiences (packages not arriving, wrong thing delivered, etc), but every time, Amazon has made it right. They consistently produce a great customer experience.

They just figured out that cost_to_resolve_complaints Once you make that leap, and commit (via support permissions / manuals / budget) to making that happen, it's a better experience overall. Not least because then it frees you as a business to what you should be focusing on. E.g. "We paid out $x million because of damaged packages. What can we do in the warehouse side to fix this?"

My issue is usually amazon sending the wrong item, or counterfits, dispite their occasionall asinine packaging of my items. That is, assuming the seller bothers to correctly list the item. But they seem to be doing little about any of it.

For instance, I recieved 2 vacuum tubes last night. (I ordered 4), and they came jammed in a huge box with no padding on 2 sides. Already scheduled for return. My return rate must be 1 in 10 these days.

Is their warehouse overhead so low as to cover this long term? I honestly don't know. But I also know I would stop doing biz wih them in a heartbeat if returning things was difficult. I did so with ebay/paypal nearly a decade ago and am happier for it.

Re: Waze Carpool

#226

Post by freehunter »

encoderer wrote: post #199
freehunter wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. There are lots of great reasons to justify it. Higher wages offset the cost of living (which can't be caused by the rising wages, right?) and has the side effect of locking out anyone who can't or won't work for a tech company, driving them from the homes they can no longer afford, ensuring that the next person who moves in there will be just like me . Personally I wouldn't want to live anywhere else. Becaus…

I think you’re being too cynical. I grew up in Ohio. Mostly I knew white people who also were born there and mostly knew white people themselves. This is 180* from the Bay Area. Sure, the enormous tech economy makes for a bit of an industrial monoculture. But if you start talking to people about things other than what they do for a living you’ll hear a lot of interesting stories.

I am being too cynical, you're right. I'm pushing into the hyperbole territory to try to make my point as clear as possible.

Diversity isn't how many black people you know. And it's not a perfect line of "SV is awful, everywhere else is better". Some places around the country are better for your soul than others, and the best way to experience life is by visiting places, spending time in places where people live drastically different lives than you do. Bonus points if you're a minority (a rich person living in a poor town, a poor person living in a rich town, black living in a white area, white living in a black area, conservative living in a liberal area, you get the idea).

Point is, congregating everyone of a type in one area leads to a monoculture which is dangerous. Race doesn't matter nearly as much as economic class, and making well-paying tech jobs centralized in one area for really no good reason does very little to help. If people going to SV are so willing to move to somewhere new for work, does it really all have to be the exact same place? With a ton of other people just like them?

Re: Waze Carpool

#227

Post by komali2 »

Retric wrote: post #146
pron wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The same thing that happens in the non-Waze case: you kick them out, call the police, get mugged etc. It's not so simple. Normally people, at least in cities, rarely hitchhike or take up hitchhikers. The goal here is to make it acceptable, and naturally greatly increase the frequency this is happening. This can be reasonably taken as an endorsement by Google to the driver/passenger, because it is -- they want this…

Read up on DC slug lines. We are talking 10,000's of people doing this daily with very minor government support for the last 15+ years. Mostly awareness and signage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slugging

>In the San Francisco Bay Area, with the third-busiest rush hour,[3] casual carpooling occurs on Interstate 80 between the East Bay and San Francisco. As of 1998, 8,000 to 9,000 people slugged in San Francisco daily.[5] However, after bridge tolls were levied on carpool vehicles in 2010, casual carpooling saw a significant decline and etiquette became more uncertain

Woah boy I have racked up so many toll violations, I just assumed I didn't have to pay a toll for HOV. Wonder why they haven't mailed them through?

Re: Waze Carpool

#228

Post by mintplant »

spike021 wrote: post #162
jobigoud wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few month ago I would have read your comment and thought that bus can't really compete for the fine grained point to point transportation. Then I went to Sydney in December. The public transportation system there is super impressive. You have a location-based app where you can tell you want to go from point A to point B (from an address, a click on the map, your favorites), it will instantly provide you with many o…

Eh, you can do the same as most of these features you mention with normal apps. At least where I live in SF, Google Maps can tell you all the different public transportation routes, times, and fares, as well as a notification for when to leave, etc. The Transit app is also really useful for this. It's just the public transit systems that need improvement, but the rider side isn't too bad.

> The Transit app is also really useful for this.

I was excited to try this, but it seems broken. Every pair of locations I give it returns "No routes found", even for stops that are directly connected by a single bus route that I can see in its database.

Re: Waze Carpool

#230

Post by j_s »

JacobDotVI wrote: post #38
NotSammyHagar wrote: post #34

In Seattle or other cities where traffic congestion is such a problem, I'd take someone for free if I could drive in the carpool lanes. I can even imagine someone who could be paid for just being a body in the car by someone really well off.

Washington, DC has slug lines, which are exactly that. http://www.slug-lines.com/Slugging/About_slugging.asp

Also (same region), per https://www.commuterconnections.org/about-us

>network of transportation organizations [...] services are provided free to the public and employers

Commuter Connections | https://tdm.commuterconnections.org/mwcog

>Instantly find rideshare partners [...] Ride Free!

Post reply on HN