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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.
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…
Works well in my experience, though I think largely only popular in Latin America at the moment.
>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 r…
Did you read the article? This is their entire business model right now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
$5.2M in driver wages over $60k/driver/year (conservatively, $30/hour * 8 hours/day * 250 work days/year) works out to about 86 drivers; less if they pay each driver more or each driver works longer hours; more if drivers aren't full time. Each driver gets, like, 5 fares a day. (I would also believe $120k/driver/year and 10 fares a day.)
Prescheduled rides seems like a nice niche; better than sitting around in a TNC lot for hours waiting for an airport fare. Would be curious to see how and if they get to the max 2.5x return for the WeFunder though.
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.
Can’t imagine why.
"net loss of just $318,000 in 2022" "earned $5.9 million in revenue from 162,294 successful trips — and $5.2 million of that went directly to driver wages"
Let's do the math: they earned $700K in net revenue and lost $318K - for a margin of -45.43%... sounds grim...
But... if they can double the net revenue to $1.4M while only growing costs 25% to 1.3M then voila they're breakeven/ramen-profitable...
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…
There’s a service in Ukraine called Uklon[0] that does pretty much exactly that. If you bid very low, it’d both take longer to find a ride, and the car/driver would usually not be great. Think a 25+ year old daewoo with no ac that smells like smoke on the lowest end vs. newish Camrys or other regular fleet cars on the mid-higher side.