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by abalone 4333 days ago
Long distance is harder. It'd work for popular commuter patterns, but you'd want a more structured service for that.

For a general near-real-time hailing system, limiting it to a smaller area means that even if your best match would add a relatively high distance penalty (say 50%), in absolute terms that's still tolerable (a few extra minutes). So that increases the probability of finding a match right now where the economics work out.