>present a seamless experience to the customers/passengers
There does exist a segment of users who are willing to navigate a less-than-seamless experience if that lets them avoid dealing with a less-than-ethical business. (And probably there's at least some PR effort involved in making their voices not count.)
Besides, the Uber/Lyft experience is far from "seamless", and developing a ride-sharing app that does _not_ aim to work on a global scale has different challenges from those outlined in that post.
>But a high-tech complexity business that's expensive to build is inherently too costly for a pool of drivers' savings to fund.
>Whenever you see "worker-owned", mentally substitute "capital-constrained" -- and it starts to make sense why many businesses domains don't have any coops rising up to compete with VC-fueled startups.
My favorite conspiracy theory is that VC is poured into software not to produce meaningful innovation, but chiefly to hypercomplicate the field in a sort of Cambrian explosion, so that the "capital-constrained" can't get anything done with the baroque frameworks and out-of-touch developers that the ecosystem produces.
Thankfully, people who understand how a computer works (and what it's good for) do exist outside of SV. Sometimes (shhh!) they're even motivated by other things besides short-term capital accumulation!
And better ethics can mean better efficiency - fewer politically driven kludges in software, less staff turnover, even the fact that people can and do accept to get paid a more average salary in exchange for working at a place that isn't screwing people over at industrial fucking scale.
That's how a cooperative can compete with a megacorpo, although realistically a more reasonable first goal would be to coexist in the same markets, or operate in markets that have demand but are deemed insufficiently profitable for the corp.