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The Drivers Cooperative: New York’s driver-owned ride-hailing app

nextcity.org

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Re: The Drivers Cooperative: New York’s driver-owned ride-hailing app

#11

Post by mattmcknight »

ramesh31 wrote: post #2

>Scheduling trips is a tricky calculation, and it all comes down to routing — you want drivers to spend as much of their shift as they can actually driving clients around, but you have to leave enough time in-between trips so the driver isn’t late for their next client. So far, the only way to do this successfully has been by using a team of human dispatchers, though the co-op is working on an automated solution usin…

I don't think having "drivers spend as much of their shift as they can driving clients" is the best objective function. It seems like you should want to get customers to their destinations as quickly as possible, not have cars driving around slowly to maximize client drive time.

"You have to leave enough time in-between trips so the driver isn’t late for their next client." also seems bizarre, as you should just be routing the minimal time cost set of vehicles to those awaiting rides. This seems to imply most rides are scheduled pickups?

Re: The Drivers Cooperative: New York’s driver-owned ride-hailing app

#12

Post by darwinwhy »

I wonder whether they've considered the possibility of open-sourcing their apps and backend. Perhaps this is just Pollyannaism, but I tend to believe that workers' rights and open-source are the perfect match in a market like ridesharing. "Just goodenough" open source solutions have difficulty breaking through in consumer software (e.g. the mythical "year of the linux desktop"), but in a market like ridesharing, worker coordination could easily provide the push to critical mass.

Re: The Drivers Cooperative: New York’s driver-owned ride-hailing app

#13

Post by cortesoft »

ramesh31 wrote: post #2

>Scheduling trips is a tricky calculation, and it all comes down to routing — you want drivers to spend as much of their shift as they can actually driving clients around, but you have to leave enough time in-between trips so the driver isn’t late for their next client. So far, the only way to do this successfully has been by using a team of human dispatchers, though the co-op is working on an automated solution usin…

This is a different problem, because the TSP is about reaching every point in the shortest distance, but in this case you can't just hit every point in any order you want. Each rider is going to want a ride at different times, and each rider is going to make their request at different times, and multiple drivers are going to be available at different times.

You are optimizing for least amount of time riders have to wait, not just for shortest distance driven.

Re: The Drivers Cooperative: New York’s driver-owned ride-hailing app

#14

Post by Sai_ »

domoritz wrote: post #9
Sai_ wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem Traveling Salesman is NP-Hard. Don't think it is solvable with current technology.

Only in the worst case and large N. For practical problems, it’s solvable for tens of thousands of nodes.

A cab service with unknown, frequently updated nodes where edge weights - driving distance from last drop to next pickup- can vary, would qualify as pretty bad version of TSP.

You can come up with a good enough solution but it’s not “solved”.

This “good enough” solution starts to break down whenever there is a huge concentration of drivers in a location. If this weren’t the case, ride shares wouldn’t have had to add a cancellation fee and hidden destinations from drivers.

Re: The Drivers Cooperative: New York’s driver-owned ride-hailing app

#15

Post by Sai_ »

jfrd wrote: post #8
Sai_ wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem Traveling Salesman is NP-Hard. Don't think it is solvable with current technology.

Surprisingly you can solve massive TSPs using heuristics. The solutions are not guaranteed to be optimal, but they can get very close to optimal without a crazy amount of computing power. The Concorde TSP solver can apparently solve instances with 85.6k cities to optimality. Pretty amazing!

Ride share companies are surviving so it’s clear that some good enough solutions do exist.

There’s a difference between the algorithms ride shares have to use and the heuristic based solution for 85.6k cities.

The graph for ride shares is constantly changing as passengers request rides from random starting points to random destinations.

This version of TSP is much harder to solve.

Re: The Drivers Cooperative: New York’s driver-owned ride-hailing app

#16

Post by djbusby »

Oh man, a friend and I were thinking of building out a FOSS Uber clone for this exact purpose. Would allow a bunch of smaller regional Ubers to exist.

Couldn't get funding and I don't have free time to write that much code.

Hope these folks are able to succeed.

FOSS is a great path for workers to seize the means of production.

Re: The Drivers Cooperative: New York’s driver-owned ride-hailing app

#17

Post by _8j50 »

ars wrote: post #10

One difference I noticed is that drivers are basically employees - they sign up for a shift and take all rides assigned to them. I tried to understand why they are almost profitable and Uber/Lyft not and as best as I can tell it's simply because Uber/Lyft are trying to grow and expand, and this co-op is not.

They are not employees because they can stop working at any point in the day and they decide to pick up rides or decline them instead of being assigned tasks they have to complete. Bad rating just means they get less priority not a bad performance review that gets them fired. They choose their tools (car), work location and take breaks whenever they want between rides.

And yes, Uber and Lyft are intentionally a "growth hack" companies.

Re: The Drivers Cooperative: New York’s driver-owned ride-hailing app

#18

Post by AlotOfReading »

Scheduled rides are a neat strategy, but they're tough for consumers to use effectively. For one thing, if you're attempting to schedule a last mile ride after you get off the subway, your arrival at the pickup point could be subject to minor delays. But on the network side, a few minutes on each ride impacts efficiency in a major way.

Personally, my biggest (non ethical) issue with Uber/Lyft et al. is that they're unreliable. There are common rides you can request (e.g. leaving the urban core after work when drivers want to be heading in for bar service) that drivers simply don't want to do. I don't think there's a faster way to create negative user associations than walking an hour home in a heat wave because the pricing model failed.

Re: The Drivers Cooperative: New York’s driver-owned ride-hailing app

#19

Post by ramesh31 »

cortesoft wrote: post #13
ramesh31 wrote: post #2

>Scheduling trips is a tricky calculation, and it all comes down to routing — you want drivers to spend as much of their shift as they can actually driving clients around, but you have to leave enough time in-between trips so the driver isn’t late for their next client. So far, the only way to do this successfully has been by using a team of human dispatchers, though the co-op is working on an automated solution usin…

This is a different problem, because the TSP is about reaching every point in the shortest distance, but in this case you can't just hit every point in any order you want. Each rider is going to want a ride at different times, and each rider is going to make their request at different times, and multiple drivers are going to be available at different times. You are optimizing for least amount of time riders have to w…

>You are optimizing for least amount of time riders have to wait, not just for shortest distance driven.

Point being though that it's fundamentally a deterministic combinatorial problem. And they have the added benefit in this case of only worrying about prescheduled trips that need to be calculated the day before. It's not trivial, but it's an algorithmic problem that has no need for inductive output.

Re: The Drivers Cooperative: New York’s driver-owned ride-hailing app

#20

Post by cortesoft »

This is an interesting startup filling a need, but I don't think it is really competing with Uber and Lyft, because they are only doing prescheduled rides.

The killer feature for Uber/Lyft is being able to get a ride at any time on demand in a matter of minutes. It doesn't seem like this will be able to get there.

I have wondered if a pure market making app would work... let drivers and riders place bids... a driver can lower their bid to get hired faster and a rider can increase their bid to get picked up faster. The app would just take a fixed cut.

Someone who doesn't mind waiting at a friends house for a while longer could pay less, but the person in a rush could get a ride fast for a bit more. Similarly, some drivers might be ok only doing a few expensive rides.

I know Uber does something like this with surge pricing, but it is not transparent at all, and you can't change your bid.

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