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Waze Carpool

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261–270 of 406 posts

Re: Waze Carpool

#261
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh and the ads! waze in Israel shows ads on the screen every time your speed is close to stopped, and then slide them up when you start moving. it's awful. irresponsible. and gave me lots of anxiety every single time. it's probably fine for people that just want traffic info, but for actual gps guidance usage it is hell.

Can't you just give them money to get rid of that? I mean they have to make money somehow.

maybe in a parallel universe where google knows monetization 101

Re: Waze Carpool

#262
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. The pure software world exists from Google's perspective, they provide zero support and then it's just a matter of individual choice if you want to use the service or not. Google can go a long way into making this significantly safer than random pick-up: you can select female only drivers or riders, only riders from…

> 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…

You are assuming hitchhiking is unsafe. It may be less safe than other forms of transportation, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's especially unsafe. News outlets love stories about strangers abducting children because of how they draw eyeballs, but that happens to be extremely rare. But the anecdotal examples make you overestimate the risk of it.

And this is safer than hitch-hiking. The vast majority of people planning on assaulting strangers dont want to leave electronic trails so they can be easily found.

Re: Waze Carpool

#263

The number of private tech companies that reinvent the BUS and think they're geniuses is staggering. But god forbid we just fund public transportation. We wouldn't want poor people using our service.

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…

Vancouver is same in regards to the service but strangely the position-tracking of a bus is more accurate on mobile google maps than the official 'transit' app, although the former says the source of data is latter.

Re: Waze Carpool

#264
post #169

The reason why I would not consider Google to legitimately compete with Uber/Lyft at scale in this arena is because it's not part of their nature to staff customer support at the level required to run operationally-intensive businesses. The rate in which something goes wrong in the real world (esp where money in exchanged) is much higher than in a pure software world, and Google is going to try to take the FAQ/chatbo…

What happens if the driver rapes somebody, or more so the passenger disappears in thin air. Google doesn’t want to take any responsibility or have any support / background checks. I’d stay a million miles away where a human is merely just an entry in their database.

Doesn't that eliminate anything that organizes people for anything? Your requirement seems to eliminate Meetup, all dating apps, Craigslist, or meeting a stranger for almost any other reason ever.

Re: Waze Carpool

#265
post #146
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

It's been happening in Houston for 15+ years, too. I suspect any city with decent HOV lanes and bad traffic has slug lines.

Re: Waze Carpool

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The same thing that happens in the non-Waze case: you kick them out, call the police, get mugged etc. The pure software world exists from Google's perspective, they provide zero support and then it's just a matter of individual choice if you want to use the service or not. Google can go a long way into making this significantly safer than random pick-up: you can select female only drivers or riders, only riders from…

> The same thing that happens in the non-Waze case: you kick them out, call the police, get mugged etc.

If you shift a large enough volume of traffic into that mode of transportation and externalize 'support' to emergency services then you are taking a free ride on a scarce resource. At a minimum there should be a first tier of support within the company offering the service, if only to serve as a mechanism to immediately halt providing the service to or from that particular passenger or driver until the matter has been dealt with.

Re: Waze Carpool

#268

The number of private tech companies that reinvent the BUS and think they're geniuses is staggering. But god forbid we just fund public transportation. We wouldn't want poor people using our service.

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…

Wait until you get to Bogota, the bus service there is nothing short of mind blowing. Buses arrive so fast you wonder if they are attached by some kind of invisible link.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransMilenio

Public transport as it should be, cheap, fast, reliable.

Re: Waze Carpool

#269
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I was reading an article about 10 years ago about this ride-sharing in the DC metro area. We discussed how a smartphone app could make all this much easier and smoother. We didn't follow up on it back then... It wasn't (and won't likely to be) the only big missed opportunity in my life.

To your benefit - it's not as easy as to take a few weekends and to code an ride-sharing app to app store.

Lots more business planning and resources are required to pull it off.

Re: Waze Carpool

#270

I gave up the Waze app for GPS as it drained my iphone battery to quickly. I switched over to the default maps app on the iphone 7.

Surely having a charging wire in your car and connecting it before a long drive is not that hard? It's the main way my Samsung phone charges, I usually go full blast playing internet radio, running Waze etc. and when I arrive my phone is 100% charged.

I always wondered why there isn't there a charging standard for phone mounts/cradles just like the old cordless phones where placing it in the cradle made two metallic leads connect the charging circuit.

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