[3Pi]

Working in the vehicle routing industry, this is something that I has passed through my mind on more than one occasion. I'm quite pleased to see it implemented - I definitely did not have the means.

In my mind, this sort of product is a great stepping stone towards the reduction in personal cars - it's starting to bring the cost of travelling down by sharing, hopefully by enough to make it accessible to less well-off people. I certainly couldn't afford a taxi to work every day. If this sort of service really takes off, it will hopefully also reduce the number of cars on the road, reducing congestion.

The obvious next step for this sort of service is to use self-driving cars, reducing the cost even further as there are no drivers to pay.

It is obviously an idea whose time has come, and I'm glad!

[jarek]

> The obvious next step for this sort of service is to use self-driving cars, reducing the cost even further as there are no drivers to pay.

Maybe eventually you can put some sort of a fixed guideway along most common travel start/end points, use larger vehicles, then perhaps try to find a way to reduce rolling resistance?

[boomzilla]

I share your sentiment. On the other hand, the upper bound of the number of car reduction is maybe 50% of the cars that would be there otherwise (assuming we can replace most single car trips by 2-3 people trips). It's a huge improvement, but the US really needs to work on public transport. Heck, why is Caltrain not more efficient?

[eru]

If sharing works out pretty well, people will start using minibuses for it. So we might see another reduction.

(In essence, that's like a municipal bus service, just with a much more flexible schedule.)

[jarek]

Eventually you'll be able to get a shared "bus" in five minutes to take you to most common destinations and at night you will be able to get a less-shared "taxi" that will cost more since there aren't people to share your trip with you.

We'll build the brave new tech world equivalent of a decent transportation system.

[eru]

If that's the only way America is gonna get a decent transportation system, so be it.

[MarkPNeyer]

when someone can buy a self-driving vehicle and hook it up to uber's network, buying a car could be a capital investment that gets you recurring revenue: you just hook your car up to uber's api, and take it to an automatic service station when the on-board diagnostics report that it needs work to be done.

[shazami]

What's wrong with Caltrian? Seems fine to me, except the difficulty of getting to/from stations.

[kansface]

Caltrain runs on diesel, is incredibly slow (much slower than driving), frequently breaks down, and doesn't travel across the bay. It was probably OK for the 70s.

[kosei]

I personally love the idea of Google self-driving cars being used in this respect. Would be interesting to see Amazon get into this space as well considering their work in optimizing inventory and restocking algorithms - seems like it could be a natural fit.