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

nextcity.org

31–40 of 137 posts

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

#31
post #5
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…

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

Being NP-hard doesn't mean it's unsolvable at all. It means it's not solvable quickly. Google maps does this millions of times per day... the number of points on the trip are few enough that you can brute force it perfectly or use a heuristic to solve it faster but less optimally. Very solvable just not optimizable algorithmicly.

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

#32
post #16

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.

> Couldn’t get funding Can’t imagine why.

Can you elaborate? Curious.

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

#34
post #30

what if drivers painted their cars a distinct color, like yellow maybe, and they were always out there... and you could just spot them on the street and wave your arm, and they'd come get you? you wouldn't need an app for that, and wait around for them to show up.

Tried that. Didn't work well - you never knew if you could find one, they often refused trips to places they didn't like, they would cheat you on the fare, and it was impossible to get one in a less popular area without calling, and you never knew if they were actually going to come.

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

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Couldn’t get funding Can’t imagine why.

Can you elaborate? Curious.

A bit self-evident, isn't it? No one is going to give you capital so that you can hire workers to seize the capital.

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

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate? Curious.

[flagged]

This comes across as overly snarky. At best, you delayed productive conversation by the time needed for two asynchronous comments. At worst, you shame someone out of getting an answer to their question.

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

#37
post #30

what if drivers painted their cars a distinct color, like yellow maybe, and they were always out there... and you could just spot them on the street and wave your arm, and they'd come get you? you wouldn't need an app for that, and wait around for them to show up.

Why did we invent LLMs when we could just get humans repetitively making memetic snowclones? Eliza was enough.

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

#38
post #34
post #30

what if drivers painted their cars a distinct color, like yellow maybe, and they were always out there... and you could just spot them on the street and wave your arm, and they'd come get you? you wouldn't need an app for that, and wait around for them to show up.

Tried that. Didn't work well - you never knew if you could find one, they often refused trips to places they didn't like, they would cheat you on the fare, and it was impossible to get one in a less popular area without calling, and you never knew if they were actually going to come.

i guess i'm the only one who never had a problem

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

#39
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry but how is ride share problem a TSP problem? Rides are assigned one at a time and I do not think they would take into account future rides while doing the assignment optimization.

Not my industry, but imagining that they accept rides within a 48 hour windows from now. You’d quickly get something somewhat similar to a TSP. But given that you have lots of additional constraints (people tend to have a clear idea when they want to get from A to B) compared to the classical TSP, it might actually be easier to solve. As those constraints limit the paths you must evaluate.

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

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate? Curious.

A bit self-evident, isn't it? No one is going to give you capital so that you can hire workers to seize the capital.

How about the workers and the customers ??

That’s why I am a fan of crowdfunding with utility tokens.

People on HN have to realize there is more to capitalism than shareholder capitalism and extracting rents from ecosystems ;-)

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