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Waze Carpool

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Re: Waze Carpool

#271

Post by bateller »

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

"Slugging"

What a charming name.

/s

Re: Waze Carpool

#272

Post by bob_theslob646 »

The question is can Waze change people's behavior?

The entire premise is on people planning.

Oh and by the way more cars =/ more traffic.

More cars traveling at the same time causes traffic.

If you want someone to blame, start blaming businesses who operate at the same hours.

It still boggles my mind how 9 to 5 came about?

Has it not been shown that people work better at different times of the day?

Re: Waze Carpool

#273

Post by sneak »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #99

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.

This isn’t some class warfare thing. Busses have terrible service. They don’t even have seatbelts. Knock off this old trope.

Re: Waze Carpool

#274

Post by dmix »

evanlivingston wrote: post #234
dmix wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why anyone would need to feel guilty or worry about that fact though. People do that everywhere. Toronto is famous for it's diversity and multiculturalism but the entire city is finely divided into various ethnic, cultural, and work enclaves (little korea, little ethiopia, 2x little italys, etc). And it works great for the most part, there's little ethnic or political tension, at least within the city pr…

I believe the issue that deserves some scrutiny is hinges on on what you say is "...a natural phenomenon." SV and the bay are magnets for individuals who possess a high concentration of capital, both social and economic. Those forms of wealth allow those individuals to shape the environment and self-select in ways that other groups of individuals don't have access to. I believe this in turn leads to a level of social…

> Those forms of wealth allow those individuals to shape the environment and self-select in ways that other groups of individuals don't have access to.

Oh please, I just reread Grapes of Wrath and other literature about the Dust Bowl migration to California and it didn't take wealth for some of the poorest Americans to form or shape communities as they came to California. The key was they were hard working and dedicated. All it took was people of similar culture coming together and investing/supporting their own community. Eventually getting their own jobs, land, political support, and assimilating into California culture... eventually becoming locals themselves.

The 'local' people in California were just as hostile to those newcomers, they saw the 'Okies' as 'uneducated and dirty' who didn't belong. Not much different from the way SF activists are to tech workers... except the classes were reversed.

Or the 'carpetbaggers' coming from the Northeast US down into the Southern US following the civil war.

It's not a new phenomenon for newcomers to feel isolation from 'locals' nor for locals to resist change. People always resist change. While it gets justified in many ways by guilt, jealousy, nostalgia, fear of competition, etc, etc. It is not fundamentally about wealth. It has a combination of many issues, but largely has do with things being different.

Reducing every social/economic issue to class, wealth, and power is fraught with issues and requires ignoring plenty of evidence and counter-examples. Much of "new left" ideology and literature is famous for being reductionist in this way. The SF activist's approach to this issue is no different.

Re: Waze Carpool

#275

Post by golemiprague »

udioron wrote: post #245

I live in Israel in a city called Modiin and use public transportion to visit client offices out of town. The public transportation by train to Tel Aviv, Hertzelia and Haifa is great, but anything else is somewhere between terrible and nonexistent. In the past year I use Waze Carpool and Moovit ( https://www.moovitapp.com/ , both developed and beta tested/dog-fooded in Israel) to get to those "unreachable" destinatio…

Modiin is a middle class suburb, Israel got less weirdos than America and early adopters are usually nicer. I am not sure it is going to work in other places and with a different mix of population.

Re: Waze Carpool

#276

Post by MBlume »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #99

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.

You're right -- what we really need is to eliminate the regulations preventing tech companies from actually running private bus systems.

Re: Waze Carpool

#277

Post by xraystyle »

darksaints wrote: post #148
Tiktaalik wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't we hire a bunch of experts to figure out what the most common and efficient routes are for the most people and then hire people to run those routes regularly? Oops I just invented buses again, just the rest of these transportation startups eventually end up doing. The extremely boring answer to our transportation problems is to properly fund public transportation. We've known the solution for ages, but it's…

> The extremely boring answer to our transportation problems is to properly fund public transportation. We've known the solution for ages, but it's kept down by the wealthy class who don't want to pay for public works that would benefit everyone. I'd say the middle class are the real problem. You see, the primary reason why transit costs so much in taxes is because few people ride it. Few people ride it because drivi…

> But here's a proposal: raise the gas tax, but refund the increase in costs on a means-tested basis. Poof, there goes the concern trolling, but the middle class is still on the hook and they really don't like it, because it might mean that they have to make different decisions about their lifestyle and location and habits

The theory is sound, but the devil is in the implementation here. Some of the largest metropolitan areas in the US (and by extension the entire world) were built around the car, not public transit. The cost to implement effective transit in such suburban sprawls is exorbitant when compared with densely packed urban areas such as NYC or Vancouver for example. There's just too much pre-existing residential area to cover effectively. I don't think it can actually be done in such an area in a way that wouldn't be exponentially less convenient than a car.

Additionally, due to the size of these cities and the number of people living in them, you're talking about completely upending the lives of quite literally tens of millions of people.

If gas is $8 a gallon, should I move closer to where my office is? What if I get a different job? In Los Angeles for instance, there's not one central business district where I can generally expect to find work. The difference between Downtown and Santa Monica in Los Angeles is over an hour during rush hour.

What about my spouse, if I have one? What if their job is in the opposite direction? Should we split the difference? What if there's no suitable housing in between the two locations? Are we going to move every time one of us changes jobs (every 3-5 years on average)? What if we have children? Do we put them in a different school every time we move? What if the schools in the area we're moving to are worse then where we are now? What about after-school activities? These are all very real issues for most lower to upper middle class Americans.

And again, you need to multiply these problems by literally tens of millions of people. It's just not feasible to price people out of their own vehicles without giving them a reasonable alternative. The demographic we're discussing here usually votes, and there's no way they'd sit still for that. I know I wouldn't, simply because Los Angeles would become unlivable overnight.

Re: Waze Carpool

#278

Post by drb91 »

dmix wrote: post #49
freehunter wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Facebook's done enough of that class segregation for us already I'm convinced the Bay Area itself has done enough of that segregation. Isn't that the entire reason people move there? Every time I ask why someone moved to SV, they say it's because that's where all of the tech talent is. Why is your startup headquartered in SV? Because that's where all the tech talent is. The only reason SV exists is because it's self…

I'm not sure why anyone would need to feel guilty or worry about that fact though. People do that everywhere. Toronto is famous for it's diversity and multiculturalism but the entire city is finely divided into various ethnic, cultural, and work enclaves (little korea, little ethiopia, 2x little italys, etc). And it works great for the most part, there's little ethnic or political tension, at least within the city pr…

> The simple fact is people primarily like being near people like themselves, culturally or otherwise.

Unless, of course, they don't. :) I can't stand talking shop outside of work. Silicon valley and San Francisco are so full of technologists and associated ancillary professions it's a pretty miserable place to live--they've displaced all the people I'd normally want to be around.

Not that I have much choice on where to work or live! I work in technology, so why would I want to live anywhere else? Just shut up and move to SF already, you'll love it!

Re: Waze Carpool

#279

Post by lern_too_spel »

vonnik wrote: post #74

It's hilarious that this came out the day after Steve Yegge lambasted Google for failing to innovate. This is a perfect example of Google arriving half way through the race. Everyone else is on the final lap, they're on the first, and they think they're running neck and neck.

I agree with Yegge, but this launched in June, not the day after Yegge's blog post.

Re: Waze Carpool

#280

Post by majani »

dawhizkid wrote: post #12

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…

It always baffles me that a company based in a country as litigious as the US has gotten away with being so careless about Customer Care for so long.
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