Tech’s broken promises: Streaming is now just as expensive and confusing as cable. Ubers cost as much as taxis. And the cloud is no longer cheap::Some tech is getting pricier and looking a lot like the older services it was supposed to beat. From video streaming to ride-hailing and cloud computing.
I never expected ride hailing apps to save money. Where from? Taxis were never a high margin business with some superfluous middleman.
Could there be some decentralized ride hailing platform?
Taxi companies need to own the car, pay for maintenance, pay wages for the driver, insurance, etc.
Ride-sharing apps offload all of the taxi-company maintenance overhead costs to the gig-driver while only paying about 50% of the fare.
But competition. If there’s another app that pays out 80%, it will have more drivers and be cheaper.
That being said, I still only know about Uber and Lyft (here in Canada). Now car sharing and electric scooter sharing has become more popular in my city
That was the original idea behind Uber etc.: you as a normal person would fire up the app when you were driving somewhere anyway, and pick up folks who happened to be wanting to go the same direction.
It only lasted about 5 minutes before people started turning it into their job.
Oh cool