The reason why I would not consider Google to legitimately compete with Uber/Lyft at scale in this arena is because it's not part of their nature to staff customer support at the level required to run operationally-intensive businesses.
The rate in which something goes wrong in the real world (esp where money in exchanged) is much higher than in a pure software world, and Google is going to try to take the FAQ/chatbot/no phone approach to service when it's going to need to staff entire buildings with agents if it doesn't want to completely piss off a nascent user base.
Unlike Uber, they appear to talk about a real carsharing system, as opposed to a taxi service with a lower entry barrier.
The prices will be much lower since we are talking about the marginal cost of adding another passenger to an already happening trip - and with full info on where people are going, Waze effectively has an endless supply of trips that are happening, it's just a matter of displaying a pop-up "Hey, Alex is going to the same place as you, do you want to give him a ride for 5$?". So the actual support required will be minimal to zero, it's just a software app to simplify what people already do, not a full transport service.
There is no such thing as software which interacts with humans that doesn’t require maintenance. On top of that, you can’t coordinate people to do things without incurring some degree of liability for their actions, and humans are capable of some pretty horrible actions when you put enough of them together.
You just described the pure software world solution.
What happens when the commuter I pick up vomits in my car? Or steals something from my car? What happens if I get picked up by a person who changes their mind about where they're going? Or decide to take an unplanned detour to go to the store, or back home to grab the laptop they forgot, or to score some heroin?
What happens when the driver gropes me? Or I grope the driver?
You absolutely need actual support, it's not going to be minimal-to-zero. Both the driver and the passenger need to be able to pick up a phone number and speak to a real human being who can resolve some sort of issue.
The same thing that happens in the non-Waze case: you kick them out, call the police, get mugged etc.
The pure software world exists from Google's perspective, they provide zero support and then it's just a matter of individual choice if you want to use the service or not.
Google can go a long way into making this significantly safer than random pick-up: you can select female only drivers or riders, only riders from your area, they can implement a minimal account age that uniquely identifies the wazer simply via ride history - even if they use an anonymous login and fake credit card data, and so on.
It's a bit harder to protect against rogue riders since they need to be able to use the app immediately, but still, phone number and credit card verification is much better the letting a random stranger into your car. If not too intrusive, they could even ask riders for a frontal picture that the driver can verify and that remains on record. So for people who would carpool anyway, it's a much better option.
> The same thing that happens in the non-Waze case: you kick them out, call the police, get mugged etc.
It's not so simple. Normally people, at least in cities, rarely hitchhike or take up hitchhikers. The goal here is to make it acceptable, and naturally greatly increase the frequency this is happening. This can be reasonably taken as an endorsement by Google to the driver/passenger, because it is -- they want this to happen more often, and are essentially saying "it's OK to hitchhike through our app". This means that they can reasonably be seen as taking part in the entire transaction and assuming some portion of the liability.
Read up on DC slug lines. We are talking 10,000's of people doing this daily with very minor government support for the last 15+ years. Mostly awareness and signage.
>In the San Francisco Bay Area, with the third-busiest rush hour,[3] casual carpooling occurs on Interstate 80 between the East Bay and San Francisco. As of 1998, 8,000 to 9,000 people slugged in San Francisco daily.[5] However, after bridge tolls were levied on carpool vehicles in 2010, casual carpooling saw a significant decline and etiquette became more uncertain
Woah boy I have racked up so many toll violations, I just assumed I didn't have to pay a toll for HOV. Wonder why they haven't mailed them through?
Smaller toll but still a toll. Do you not have a fastrak. I can't understand how anyone in the bay area who drives doesn't have a fastrak it saves so much time. You don't even need to keep it with you just register the license plate with the website.
I was reading an article about 10 years ago about this ride-sharing in the DC metro area. We discussed how a smartphone app could make all this much easier and smoother. We didn't follow up on it back then...
It wasn't (and won't likely to be) the only big missed opportunity in my life.
I have to think that putting it into an app is meant to encourage people who would otherwise never do this to do so
-- the same way people happily use Uber who would never dream of using a gypsy cab under normal circumstances (and passengers then get upset/surprised/complain if Uber doesn't satisfy the expectations their implicit endorsement creates).
You are pushing the argument a bit by assuming that people will treat it as something different than hitchhiking simply because it's via an app and in-city. There is no reason to asume that - but I do agree that false advertising from Google and failure to properly inform the users of the risks could expose Google to such a liability. The answer is not to add customer support, but to be honest with the users regarding the risks- and make large commissions in the process.
I think that people will almost certainly treat it as something different than hitchhiking, and Google wants them to. In fact, the service depends on it, because if people treated it the same, it would happen at the same frequency as it happens today -- which is hardly at all -- and the service will fail.
I think you're overestimating how much people can and do rely on Uber support when something goes wrong in an UberPool.
And underestimate people's willingness assume all the risks with carpooling with a stranger. I see people lined up for a shared carpool to the DC suburbs every day.
I contact Lyft and Uber support multiple times a year for various reasons, and I barely even use Line/Pool.
Shit happens. If a company is acting as facilitator and money-handler, they are going to get a lot of customer queries, and they are going to alienate most of them if they aren't prepared for it.
> You are pushing the argument a bit by assuming that people will treat it as something different than hitchhiking simply because it's via an app and in-city.
Are you suggesting that Google will market this as "it's just like hitchhiking, and is no different, don't @ me"?
Originally, for the East Bay to San Francisco trips, cash would not exchange hands because the Bay Bridge toll was waived for carpools. Now that the carpool toll is $2.50, my understanding is that it's a little more awkward.
You are assuming hitchhiking is unsafe. It may be less safe than other forms of transportation, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's especially unsafe. News outlets love stories about strangers abducting children because of how they draw eyeballs, but that happens to be extremely rare. But the anecdotal examples make you overestimate the risk of it.
And this is safer than hitch-hiking. The vast majority of people planning on assaulting strangers dont want to leave electronic trails so they can be easily found.
I somewhat recently learned about the propaganda from the FBI in the 60's and 70's to discourage hitchhiking. (possibly a covert assault on civil rights protesters hitching to rallies) It's easy to be scared of failure, suffering or what can go wrong... but not everyone is excited about what could go right.
Ultimately, I believe a big reason why hitchhiking is not very prevalent is that both the cost of air travel and vehicle ownership has gone down significantly over time. (adjusted for inflation)
I think the point is: As long as the person is with you, they share the fuel cost. You already decided to use a car, so you're driving, but the other person is now able to split the cost with you and hitch a ride.
Unfortunately the reality of the situation is: Even with Uber / Lyft there are instances of groping and rape. Once you are in someone's car they have power over you. They don't have to stop. They can threaten to crash the car, etc. And without any vetting this is a risky move.
This can absolutely not survive without some sort of support.
While others say "people already hitchhike" the truth is yes, and there's no liable company so people get paranoid and such. This app will enable a bigger scale which causes more issues.
Speaking as a former hitchhiker who used it to travel through 39 states, it's actually legal almost everywhere. What is illegal is to stand in the path of travel of a roadway, and in some locations standing on the shoulder is also illegal. But on a sidewalk, onramp, etc, as long as you're not physically in the road, it's almost always ok.
Some exceptions being Utah, Delaware, New Jersey, and maybe another, where you're specifically banned from soliciting rides using signage.
Sadly, the best resource for seeing what the laws are in each state was digihitch.com, which went down in 2014, I believe when the founder passed. Quite sad, they had pamphlets for every state with relevant laws written down -- it came in handy a few times when police stopped me. They were always respectful, but I did have to clarify the laws a few times, since it's clear if read, but not widely understood.
I encourage you to read the reviews on the Waze app. "User keeps sending me lewd messages and can still see my trips even though I blocked him" "the system automatically deactivated my account and I couldn't contact anyone".
Sure it's early days and these hiccups will be reduced. But they'll never completely go away and you need human support to resolve these situations. Better filters and software intelligence will help, but they won't be trained enough or effective for a long time.
Implementing proper features to block a user is the first thing a social app needs to get right. Esp if you can physically track users. That's basically an invitation for stalkers.
> The pure software world exists from Google's perspective, they provide zero support and then it's just a matter of individual choice if you want to use the service or not.
This is something only an engineer would say. In the real world, once you provide a service, you absolutely are on the hook— both ethically and in the mind of the average consumer— for providing some level of service when it goes wrong. “Don’t like, don’t use” is not an acceptable answer, especially in a business like this where outcomes like robbery, rape, etc. are all possible.
> once you provide a service, you absolutely are on the hook— both ethically and in the mind of the average consumer— for providing some level of service when it goes wrong.
The moral and legal liability has precise limits. No software application or payment service could be ever expected to prevent any and all criminal activity in relation to it's use. Google is on the hook, but to a more much limited extent than you suggest, namely they need to do their due diligence in providing a safe service, as far as it's reasonably expected, and inform the users as to the limitations of the service and that the other participants are not endorsed or vetted by Google. That is a level of risk and limited liability they can legally offer, because the much riskier anonymous hitchiking is generally legal.
Google is absolutely not responsible for the rapes and muggings perpetrated by users of Adwords or Waze.
>Google is absolutely not responsible for the rapes and muggings perpetrated by users of Adwords or Waze.
If you or a family member used Waze Carpool, and got raped or murdered, are you going to sit there quietly and say "oh well, not Google's fault"?
As a engineer providing a software solution, it's great to sit in an office desk and say "there are precise legal limits", it's exact, precise, formal, and correct. Like a math problem almost. This is the exact line.
But imagine if you used somebody else's service, and you got raped. Or your family member got raped. Are you really going to not sue and let the newspapers know what happened? It's not just 1's and 0s anymore, it becomes a moral/emotional issue.
Could ask the same question to an auto engineer who's relative dies in a car crash. Should he quit his job, should we ban cars?
While auto safety is important, cars save much more lives than they take - and the economic opportunities they enable drastically change the median quality of life in societies where they are used.
In the same way, carsharing is not an enabler of crime, it's much safer than hitchhiking and would be a drastic improvement in the lives of people who are economically dependent of hitchhiking.
A good example is the Highway of Tears murders - in the last 40 years 20 to 40 women disappeared or were found dead hitchhiking the same stretch of highway in Canada. They were typically underprivileged and of aboriginal origins, and lacking other forms of transportation. The vast majority of cases remained unsolved.
Should something like internet carsharing had been in use by a victim, the police would have had acces to a vast trove of forensic data, including their last match to a known Waze user, identified by credit card, phone fingerprint and cell tower and GPS location history, as well as the victims own location trail up to the point where her phone is taken away/shut down. While a determined high tech killer could operate with these constraints, it's orders of magnitude more difficult. A determined killer is by definition unstoppable by any service or company.
Yes but if your relative dies in a car crash, you can sue for damages. And you probably would, even if, say, you signed some kind of safety agreement before buying the car waiving the right to sue.
Just because the law "precisely" says it's not the carmaker's fault, doesn't mean the carmaker is not "on the hook" or share some of the legal burden.
I am not saying that we should ban cars or ban carsharing. I am saying, if you offer carsharing as a software service, and something goes wrong during that service, you are involved legally. It's not a precise "on/off" switch like launching a software product.
They ought to blame the murderer/rapist since people using an app to connect individual consumers aren't employees or customers of said business. They will probably try to blame whomever has the deepest pockets but that doesn't mean that we ought to or that the law will.
Weak legal arguments aside, if Google allows criminals or even just bad drivers/passengers to use the app then people are going to lose their trust in it and stop using it.
Criminals, bad drivers, and bad passengers probably all use casual carpooling opportunities, yet those continue to operate in many urban areas. With even minimal attention to the problem, any app-based solution will have better opportunity to identify and filter out those problems, so while it's a potential issue, I think it's unlikely to be particularly problematic.
If the app is aiming to making carpooling more accessible, you will see an increase in occurrence of these issues.
The point I'm driving at is that it's still a marketplace and it comes with all the same standard hazards that apply to any marketplace. There are disputes and exceptions that have to be managed. Machines are not good at that yet.
Casual carpooling opportunities don't have enormously wealthy corporations behind them.
Setting the support obligation or morality questions aside for a moment (though I'm on the side of "by facilitating and profiting from this, you accept some responsibility for the quality of that facilitation"), that big difference is still critical: suing the operator of a neighborhood carpool mailing list or somesuch has limited yield. Suing Google has potentially massive yield. So a corporation should think about that sort of risk, just like they would the PR risks, etc, of letting it be an unregulated wild west.
Your position sounds a lot like "light or even largely-community-based self-moderation will be enough" and yet platforms like Twitter and Reddit that have attracted some large controversies and PR shitshows even without real money or real physical harm being involved. Heck, "don't read the comments" is standard internet advice to the point of being cliche.
> The same thing that happens in the non-Waze case: you kick them out, call the police, get mugged etc.
If you shift a large enough volume of traffic into that mode of transportation and externalize 'support' to emergency services then you are taking a free ride on a scarce resource. At a minimum there should be a first tier of support within the company offering the service, if only to serve as a mechanism to immediately halt providing the service to or from that particular passenger or driver until the matter has been dealt with.
That's only true if the service is likely to induce behavior that require such intervention - otherwise it's absolutely ok, for example, to call a public ambulance when a taxi customer gets sick, as oposed to arranging private insurance for your customers.
There is no proof ridesharing would induce criminality, quite the contrary, it's a much safer alternative to random hitchhiking.
Completely agree with this; not only are you more likely to share a common origin or destination, but it also becomes an opportunity to meet someone new within your network.
> Google can go a long way into making this significantly safer than random pick-up: you can select female only drivers or riders
This specific example will likely never happen. It's such a can of worms, even before you get to people purposefully misrepresenting themselves on their profiles and creeping people out.
It depends whether you see Waze as a transportation service or not. Many European regulators would see this as a paid transportation service. And then Google has to deal with customers who were not satisfied with any part of the service.
From the site:
"Make a little money" - paid service, maybe even considered a part-time employment
> it's going to need to staff entire buildings with agents if it doesn't want to completely piss off a nascent user base
That part from the original comment explains it though. I'm already pretty pissed at Google for them not being available at all while some music company is adding claims to all my videos. This is just annoying, but being groped by a person that a Google app set me up with would be infinitely worse.
This is exactly how Uber turned into a taxi service. They tried ridesharing, it turns out that people in cars do sketchy things and piss each other off, or worse.
I would rather see local grassroots organizations take on this project.
Cynically, if this is true, is it possible they switched because of the sheer profitability opportunities of the taxi-industry vs car-pooling.
Looking at this, i would think that if (and I'm certainly not saying it would/will happen) car-pooling became enabled and socially popular, it presumably both has naturally thinner margins than a taxi service, plus take out significant demand for individual trips from the likes of a taxi service.
Any references to stories/articles about their ride sharing efforts? Was it prior to their incorporation as UberCab or an experiment from further along?
It seems (from the pitch deck posted in another comment) that I had conflated "ride sharing" with "unregulated use of your car and free time to work for a cab service". It seems I was biased by all the "sharing economy" BS and jumped to a conclusion I shouldn't have jumped to.
ZimRide preceded UberCar. They largely targeted college campuses. Universities would pay them an annual subscription fee to enable ride sharing on their campus.
No links but I'm pretty sure they started off as actual ride-sharing, as in an app to help people car-pool. I'm assuming there was an "a-ha" moment when they realised the laws protecting state-authorized taxi services could be circumvented if you hailed the taxi via a phone app rather than by flagging them down.
> This is exactly how Uber turned into a taxi service. They tried ridesharing, it turns out that people in cars do sketchy things and piss each other off, or worse.
Citation needed. My understanding is that the margins on actual ride-sharing, compared to being a taxi company, were too low for them.
And that they actually started as a black cab car company.
I'm actually kind of fascinated that an app that potentially sovles a problem via enabling a social solution is actually being phrase as a "software world solution".
More so, I'm amazed that what would previously have been deemed a "social issue" that you just have to deal with every day in dealing with other people in a car pool or society in general is now being framed as a commercial issue that needs customer support/someone to blame other than the people involved in the actual car.
Rather than being a software world solution, it seems we're heading further and further down the path where what is deemed a "solution" is the thing that tries to remove any element of social-interaction/community and places that in the context of commerical/legal interaction.
Have we really gotten to the point where its so radical to suggest that we survive without a commercial entity to blame when we car pool? And that this entity is doing something that helps us by enabling car pooling, rather than hurting us or which is responsible for what happens to us when we carpool?
Edit:
I mean, the other thing about carpooling...these are people who have likely been:
a) have a verified form of identification
b) commonly live and work in your own community
c) will grow to commonly carpool with you
actually, there's an issue from the provider's point of view. After the initial contact and period of time...i need them in this as a third party...why exactly?
> What happens when the commuter I pick up vomits in my car?
Guess you have to use some of that hard earned ridesharing money to deal with the occasional downside such as this. It's not just free money, and anyone that thinks in terms ot cash for ride and that's the only things to think of is naive. You've thought it these scenarios, other people should too, and take that into account when deciding if it's worth it.
> Or steals something from my car?
File a police report.
> What happens if I get picked up by a person who changes their mind about where they're going?
Let them out at the first feasible opportunity, as long as there is some infrastructure (or they accept the location). Let them deal with finding transport from there.
> Or decide to take an unplanned detour to go to the store, or back home to grab the laptop they forgot, or to score some heroin?
Let them out as above, they can secure additional transport on their own.
> What happens when the driver gropes me? Or I grope the driver?
File a police report.
> You absolutely need actual support, it's not going to be minimal-to-zero. Both the driver and the passenger need to be able to pick up a phone number and speak to a real human being who can resolve some sort of issue.
You do need support, but clear and up-front expectations can reduce that quite a bit. I agree Google is horrible at this, and hasn't shown themselves as able to supply even the minimal amount of support I noted above.
I'm honestly surprised that Google doesn't create separate companies to handle actual product sales (and keep the Google name for the product if they feel the need) just to get past this horrible part of their culture. They just can't support anything adequately. Then again, we keep using their products even with this crappy support, so it's not like the market is punishing them enough to make them care. :/
> > What happens if I get picked up by a person who changes their mind about where they're going?
> Let them out at the first feasible opportunity, as long as there is some infrastructure (or they accept the location). Let them deal with finding transport from there.
Nope, gp was talking about getting picked up by someone who changes mind. You can't let them out, it's their car.
Oh. Drop the passenger of at an appropriate interim location, and you're forced to fund part or all of their subsequent trip accommodations to their original destination.
And suddenly we are back to the human help desk again.
Who is going to decide what is reasonable cost for covering the replacement trip. Is a bus ticket ok? cab ride? limo? Should the cost of time be counted for?
Reasonable cost is something you would define through policy, and would likely be based on percentage of trip traveled, initial cost, and some percentage as a premium. Even in human staffed companies this isn't left entirely to the discretion of the person handling the case.
I 's not entirely simole, but let's not act like it's impossible either. People use Google apps and services with shitty support all the time, because Google is fairly good at reducing the times you need support and also because they are pretty good at saying "you pay $X, we provide Y, and Z is what you can expect if there's a problem, and if you don't like that, go find a competitor."
Make breaking the contract painful on both parties, and hopefully it will be rare. In the case where it happens, you try to make sure the normal penalty covers it, and where it doesn't you eat the cost and look at why it failed and fix it if you can.
These things could happen, but since the product/service is about carpooling, I tend to pick up the same people repeatedly. Any time you work with a new person, there is a risk. That risk goes down significantly with repeated rides. I initially had issues with pick up and drop off location, due to Waze letting you pick how many minutes you're willing to walk. With new riders, I have a chat before accepting so they understand the nuances of Waze Carpool.
That's probably a similar, if not the same problems that AirBnB has to deal with regularly; how do they solve it? IIRC though, for that one it's more of an outlier - most people are decent people.
I think it’s intersting that you go to medium for even small claims is a phone call.
I find the level of support we can get over chat to be pretty good nowadays, my bank, insurance, company HR also deals with all non lofe threatening issues by mail and messaging only.
We’re finaly getting away from a phone centric world, and I feel the service is actualy better while cheaper and more efficient.
I specifically chose "phone call" because it's an instant response, and you're certain you're talking to a human being - someone who can empathize, and who can elevate, and who's focused on you, right now.
A chat box? That can be a bot. That can be someone in a call center in Hyderabad or Abilene. That can be someone juggling five conversations at the same time, whose ability to escalate starts and ends at a button, the effects of which they don't even really understand.
For these reasons I would seriously like to see is a carpooling system for regular trips, e.g. to and back from work. Intuitively, at least for me, that has fewer risks.
These are exceptions. If they happen, they are your problem. And if they eventually cost Google money, then that's no problem because they are exceptions anyway. So that's how Google gets away with it.
They have probably worked those issues out by dogfooding this internally already, don't you think?
It's not like they just thought it up and didn't test it out internally as they are wont to do. Those issues were likely discovered and have mitigation. Googliness only gets people to be nice to a point.
> They have probably worked those issues out by dogfooding this internally already, don't you think?
They absolutely could not work out the problem of being, e.g., abused by a driver, internally. By being employees of the company that provides the service, they have an automatic customer service hotline by way of HR.
If I catch a ride to work with my coworker Jeremy, by using a company-supplied app explicitly for us to test, and Jeremy gropes me, you bet your ass HR is going to hear about it as soon as I hang up with the police department.
You make a good point. However, you imply that the watchful eye of HR would prevent this happening and yet Google is not sex-crimes free. I grant that it may show up in lower numbers but these things will show up in a years-long program.
1 hour of commuting could cost something like 30$ in gas (Europe), vechile depreciation and tolls. Sharing that cost 50-50 or 33-33-33 for a 5-10 minutes delay would yield a 120-180$ / hour rate for the delay period. Very few people could afford to turn that down, it's the average income of an whole hour of work compressed into 5 minutes.
still going to run awry of the recent push by many jurisdictions to shut down or muzzle Uber. If anything many politicians will just see it as and end run / play of words.
Now the fun would come when participants are also in their local cities ride share program. We (Atlanta) have apps for Ride Share and Carpooling already. However the state did run car pooling / ride sharing incentives you could sign up for. I would assume other cities had similar, the key difference here is the driver was not charging. Also, be damn careful your insurance limits and restrictions if you ever do either method.
If this is the logic behind Waze Carpool, they are SERIOUSLY misguided. If I own a car and and I’m driving to work, my privacy and security during my commute is worth a lot more than $5. No way I’m picking up randos and sitting in silence with them for an hour for a measly coffee.
I've only used Waze Carpool as a rider and mostly on 60 min+ long trips, but most of the drivers I had were just tired of the long commute and looking for someone to entertain them. They were tired of audiobooks and podcasts.
Even though I was going ~20 miles in the carpool lane most of the time, the 10 minutes they saved would be wiped out by the 15-20 minutes they had to go out of their way to pick me up and drop me off. Everyone told me I was the only one going that far, most of the carpools they could only use the carpool lane for 3-4 miles which didn't save any time.
Other than that, I had two drivers who wanted to do their part to save the earth by carpooling which were fine. I also had two drivers who were nice but just really wanted the gas money. Those drivers both had really old cars that were dirty with trash and seemed poorly maintained. While they were ok drivers, I really did question if the tires were bald or what would happen if we were in an accident.
I would have used this every weekend I drove home from college (~3 hours), back when I was in college. Especially if I could just get paired with someone on campus going to some city along the way, but I'd also be down to pick people up on cities along the way as well.
1+ hour trips sound like a perfect opportunity for this. I'm a kind of get-in-at-the-last-minute guy at work, but I'd probably also pick up a person or two per week on the drive home, when I don't mind a little delay.
People without spare money are of the wrong 'calibre'?
We weren't all born with latte money to spare. A CEO, brain surgeon or astronaut might have had a shitty car and been happy for an easy $5 when they were in grad school. Calibre my ass.
If the carpooling passengers could be "randos" that someone may be worried about, the carpooling drivers could be "of the wrong calibre" that someone may be worried about as well.
When you put it that way, I start to think Amazon should get into this business. I'm sure everyone has one bad customer experience incident with them, yes, but overall they're one of the highest rated for customer experience.
Then Amazon would say "Hey, while you're on your way there, mind taking a few packages with you?"
Now that I think about it, Amazon would be perfect to do it.
I can't remember the last Amazon package I got that wasn't on of their contract, on-demand drivers. Amazon already gives them packages and the optimal route to take and a pretty good estimate of how long that'll take the driver. They could use that and have the driver pick up/drop off people along their route and know a pretty good time frame the driver would arrive.
> I can't remember the last Amazon package I got that wasn't on of their contract, on-demand drivers.
At the moment, there are 10 Amazon packages not yet delivered to my house - 4 haven't updated the computer with their shipping information, 2 UPS, 1 USPS, 2 AMZL US, and 1 from a Foreign Post.
> Amazon already gives them packages and the optimal route
Yup. I've had a number of bad experiences (packages not arriving, wrong thing delivered, etc), but every time, Amazon has made it right. They consistently produce a great customer experience.
They just figured out that cost_to_resolve_complaints < cost_of_lost_customer.
Once you make that leap, and commit (via support permissions / manuals / budget) to making that happen, it's a better experience overall.
Not least because then it frees you as a business to what you should be focusing on. E.g. "We paid out $x million because of damaged packages. What can we do in the warehouse side to fix this?"
My issue is usually amazon sending the wrong item, or counterfits, dispite their occasionall asinine packaging of my items. That is, assuming the seller bothers to correctly list the item. But they seem to be doing little about any of it.
For instance, I recieved 2 vacuum tubes last night. (I ordered 4), and they came jammed in a huge box with no padding on 2 sides. Already scheduled for return. My return rate must be 1 in 10 these days.
Is their warehouse overhead so low as to cover this long term? I honestly don't know. But I also know I would stop doing biz wih them in a heartbeat if returning things was difficult. I did so with ebay/paypal nearly a decade ago and am happier for it.
I've contacted all of theses services independently and had positive customer support experiences: Google Wifi, Fi, Google Store (phones), and Drive. Time frame is last couple of years.
I've had the opposite experience, but this was probably further back then you. I remember trying to call Google to get info about Google maps and it was just a run around. I spent 3 hours trying to figure out who controlled the map tiles behind Apples Maps powered by Google and got nowhere.
Even if you go to Google's contact page now[1] it's obscure and the first thing they try to do is shuttle you off to forums or a boilerplate FAQ. You can't run a consumer business like that.
Google is great at building pure tech products like Google Search and Gmail, but not so good when it's a product where you might have to talk to a human being.
Just going to point out that for pixel phones for example, you type in "pixel customer support" on google, click on the "contact us" button, and then answer a couple of (really easy) questions and are given the option to use an online chat or a phone call with support.
(I work at Google, but I had the same experience before I worked there). I think the best way of putting it is that (the consumer part of) maps is a library book, and that you wouldn't expect phone support for a library book. You would expect phone support for a product you buy, and you get that. (Google's service for pretty much all of their paid products is decent, or at least it exists). Did/does Microsoft offer phone support for their free software products? I just looked for help with outlook, and got directed to...a chatbot.
Yeah that's a possibility. As I mentioned, I haven't really tried to interact with Googles customer service in the past few years so maybe/hopefully it's a lot better now than it was then.
Until some algo decides to delete your universal Google account that powers everything from this company by request of some other bot or by some totally opaque procedure with penalties and so-called-AI detection of your activity. And the only thing you can do is nothing really. Just google such cases, they happen regularly. Of the more insane ones was the musician had his track used by BigCorp as a fair use or something and then automated algo of BigCorp send DMCA takedown to Google and it just banned legitimate song author and there is zero ways to appeal it.
I would've refrained from sharing if you hadn't mention project Fi. Me calling in to get my Nexus 5x fixed was such a piss poor experience that I would never consider them for mobile service again.
That's crazy, because I had the exact opposite experience. Everytime I've called Project Fi support, I've gotten great help, and they replaced my 5x with a refurbished one for free very quickly when it got stuck in a reboot loop.
Its hit and miss, of 4 people I know of that owned Nexus 5x's at one point or another, two have hit the bootloop issue, one got a free pixel 2 as a replacement, and the other got told to pound sand.
I agree that Google has a customer-service problem, and would also note that it seems to extend from their consumer tech to their enterprise offerings.
For example, when Gitlab decided to transition from the cloud, we saw Google Engineers jump in the discussion thread unprompted, criticizing Gitlab's decision and not-very-subtly telling Gitlab to follow up over email. Obviously, these low-level employees weren't directed to act in concert, but it seems like they came from a culture where the customer knows nothing and is always wrong.
This will probably be very cheap just to cover gas. They probably wont do customer support and tell driver/rider they are on their own. Since the rider pays up front they have their Identity and cash up front.
I don't see Uber and Lyft competing against this service since the driver isn't going to make a living. On the other hand this will take a lot of rides from other ride share services.
The reason I wouldn't is Google's obsession with building US-only businesses (Example: Project Fi). Uber is worldwide and is a huge timesaver whenever I travel within Europe.
(Edit: Had to reword my example since people just love taking stuff out of context.)
There are many great examples of Google failing to internationalise, but Google Fi requiring a US billing address is not one of them.
Fi is a domestic cell phone service, it provides international roaming as a bonus to its US customers - at much increased cost (to them) compared to domestic service. I wouldn't be surprised if roaming permanently was a violation of their terms of service (it is for Three in the UK, who provide a similar perk)
You can of course criticise Google for not launching domestic service in countries across the world, but in fairness to them, that's not a small problem.
You're ignoring my point. The costs internationally are far higher than they are domestically. The roaming agreements they have with those networks almost certainly prohibits full time use by a customer. Sometimes there are valid reasons to not launch a service, particularly when the whole point of it is to be low cost!
I agree with criticism when Google doesn't internationally launch something they control entirely (say, the Pixel phone). But this is not that.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, I'm not claiming there isn't a valid line of reasoning that gets us to the end state. Of course there are reasons and of course some of them might be outside Google's control.
But Europe has a lot of people (nearly the same population as the US) that are potential customers. Ridesharing in Europe is quite popular but apps are insufficient. Uber is banned in some countries. So Waze should work well if it gets proper support.
Doesn't that eliminate anything that organizes people for anything? Your requirement seems to eliminate Meetup, all dating apps, Craigslist, or meeting a stranger for almost any other reason ever.
I had problems with my google home mini controlling my android tv and went to the help page for it. A chatbox appeared and for about an hour a support agent talked me through various things to try (the only thing that worked was factory data reset on the TV). Pretty sure it was not a bot, unless they've gotten really good.
Used Waze Carpool about 30 times 6 months ago. I was actually pleasantly surprised at the level of support. I reported two software bugs in detail and they did get back to me quickly both times and we had a fairly complex discussion.
I actually read the Waze t&c when I signed up many years ago, the lack of privacy is astounding, they have pretty much all of your location data from driving which did make me feel more secure.
Sounds like their monetisation strategy. But there are issues with network intermediaries' structural moneymaking strategies.
The French startup blablacar.com is the biggest existing player in the market for real ridesharing, at least in Western Europe. And It does take some customer service to run these things. I've used it a fair amount.
The biggest issue is that to protect their revenue cut, they track and censor messages between members of their platform until the ride is booked so they don't pay cash.
Also, they force bookings to a specific time, and so you have to describe your journey on the comments, and so that way some passengers' attitude treat it like a cheap uber, and not a ride share.
Their Google Suite customer service is great, tried it multiple times and they immediately helped me and solved my problems. As far as I know their support is only good if you are actually paying for something.
The reason I would consider Google to legitimately compete with them are the following.
1. If they have issues with their system they will create a competitor to it internally.
2. They have the money to subsidize just like uber and lyft.
3. They are the company that could either perform a deal with Elon for his data or buy Tesla out.
4. Since no "contractor" that is employed by uber or lyft have any loyalty torward another it will just drive down prices even more. I'm not sure Uber could survive that or even lyft.
You are joking. That's like saying Amazon has AI service on the scale of google. No google customer service has unfortunately a very long way to go. Give google a million machines and it can train it to the nth degree. But solving silly human problems was never its strength.
Such statements (about customer support) are completely subjective though I'm not sure you can just fling that out there as a global truth. Project Fi, while perhaps an outlier, bucks your point.
What we've learned most at Scoop is that this is all about human experience. Commuters are regular people with regular, complicated lives - they have family obligations, schedules, meetings, work priorities, personal desires. Having accessible, thoughtful support is, to us, a critical part of that experience.
We believe that software can certainly scale your support efforts and solve a lot of the core problems / answer a lot of the questions. But commuting is an everyday, twice-a-day activity and having a place to go for questions and needs is natural.
The really big difference between Waze Carpool and Uber/Lyft is that the driver is paid at most 54 cents a mile (e.g., gas money), and Waze will only match the driver with passengers for two trips / day.
So it is not designed to be something where the driver will make a living, but really just as a way for a driver to get some company, maybe take advantage of the HOV lanes, and it gets some cars off of the road to reduce congestion.
This has impacts to the sort of insurance drivers will need to get, since it's really no different from traditional car pooling. I would not be surprised if, over time, the system tries to pair people who have previously shared rides together for subsequent trips (unless either party rates the other as, "would rather not share a ride with this person"). Knowing that you are sharing the ride with the same person that you normally share your car with would make for a much better user experience, since people are, after all, social creatures.
This point is dead-on and the key distinction between ridesharing (or really, ride-hailing) and carpooling.
With Scoop, for example, all the people who Driver are just everyday folks. They're commuters like you, me, and the Riders they get matched up with. The economic incentives are like a bonus - where the real value is the improved time in the car and the time savings from the carpool lane (where applicable). And of course, other benefits around sustainability and parking that really impact and motivate some commuters.
I was interested in checking this out until you mentioned driver is paid at most $0.54 per mile. That really stinks for city travel where commute times are long and parking at the downtown destinations is expensive. There is no incentive for me to pick up a carpooler on my 30 minute 6 mile drive into the city where parking costs $26/day. In rush hour traffic, it'll easily add an extra 15-20 minutes to my commute each way to pick anyone up.
It would subsidize $6.50 of my parking but I'd end up with an extra 30-40m of driving each day. Perhaps it's better than nothing?
If you are going into the city anyway for work, you can drop off your passenger near a subway stop, and continue into work. The assumption is that you were driving anyway, and so the cost of adding a carpooler and dropping him or her maybe 3-5 minutes out of your normal drive.
You're right that if you need to go out of your way at pickup or dropoff, or if you weren't going to drive into the city anyway because parking is $$$, this isn't going to work for you. But then that wasn't the intended target audience. If the goal is to get cars off the road, and you weren't going to drive, but take light rail as the saner way to commute into the city --- then by all means, continue using rail or light rail for your commute!
If picking up somebody adds 15-20 minutes to your 30 minutes commute, it's probably not worth carpooling in the first place... if you're ready to make that sacrifice for a financial incentive, you should use Lyft or Uber instead.
The service certainly isn't new. But Scoop, Lyft, and Waze all have different monetization models. Waze is ad-funded, plus its traffic data provides value to Google Maps. Lyft takes a cut of the money paid to the drivers. Scoop is apparently getting funded by the employers and office parks where they are providing service. These are all different models, and the fact that Lyft shut down their carpool service indicates that it's not a good fit for their business model.
I use this (and Scoop) in the Bay Area. It's slower and requires some decorum. A 25-minute trip may take, including waiting, 45. And a ride I might have spent on the phone or napping requires, at the very least, respectful silence.
On the plus side, it's far cheaper (three or four dollars versus $10 for Line/Pool and $20 for X/Line). And conversations with drivers are usually quite delightful.
On the latter, I am mixed about my preference to converse with fellow well-paid, well-educated technologists. I don't know if this is resource-saving camaraderie or a furthering of a classist California where blue and white collars fall into further mutual isolation.
> On the latter, I am mixed about my preference to converse with fellow well-paid, well-educated technologists. I don't know if this is resource-saving camaraderie or a furthering of the mutual isolation of white and blue collar Californians.
I mean, if you're not talking to your uber/lyft driver as-is...
I don't know. I'm convinced Facebook's done enough of that class segregation for us already. At least in the case of peer carpools, people are actually talking.
>Facebook's done enough of that class segregation for us already
I'm convinced the Bay Area itself has done enough of that segregation. Isn't that the entire reason people move there? Every time I ask why someone moved to SV, they say it's because that's where all of the tech talent is. Why is your startup headquartered in SV? Because that's where all the tech talent is. The only reason SV exists is because it's self-segregated into a high density of well-paid, well-educated technologists.
There are many places around the country that have tech jobs and a far lower cost of living, but why do people choose SV instead of those other places? Because SV has a higher density of people who are just like me.
I'm not sure why anyone would need to feel guilty or worry about that fact though.
People do that everywhere. Toronto is famous for it's diversity and multiculturalism but the entire city is finely divided into various ethnic, cultural, and work enclaves (little korea, little ethiopia, 2x little italys, etc). And it works great for the most part, there's little ethnic or political tension, at least within the city proper.
It's a natural phenomenon. The simple fact is people primarily like being near people like themselves, culturally or otherwise. Intellectuals, working class, artists etc, etc have always grouped up.
Absent some type of grand social engineering I don't see how you could change that. Nor whether the people would be better of with it.
But just because there are enclaves or grouping doesn't mean you need to be isolated in your social networks either. Cities are big places with plenty of people and SF is no different.
>I'm not sure why anyone would need to worry about that fact
SV is famous for solving problems that impact SV or cities like SV. Whenever I hear the question from startup/techie folks "are we in a bubble", I always think the answer is "yes, but not how you think". We're not in a bubble of too many high valuation startups, we're in a bubble where we don't understand the rest of the world around us. Because we're living paycheck to paycheck on a $250k salary in a $5k/mo studio apartment getting our food from Postmates and having drones deliver our Amazon packages. And after a while, you start to think that's just how it is. But it's not. Not for the vast majority of people who don't live in SV, Austin, or Seattle.
That's the value diversity brings, that's the danger of suburbs everyone's been talking about since forever, and that's where the Bay Area is going. Quickly.
The closest Whole Foods to me is over an hour and a half away. Until last year, the closest Trader Joe's was over 3 hours away. I work in tech making six figures, and my neighbor (living in a detached, single family home) is a diesel mechanic. The guy on the other side owns his own home but just works as a cashier at the local grocery store, because our cost of living isn't ridiculous and you can afford a house on $12/hr. Even myself, I recently got schooled when I said $65k/yr doesn't make you rich: the number of people popping out of the wood-work to say what making $65k would mean to them and what luxuries it could afford them was astounding. Just hitting $65k would double most of their income.
We don't have Uber around here. We don't have Postmates. Amazon doesn't deliver same-day. We can't get Google to drop off our groceries for us. Our employers don't have a bus to take us to work. Some people may say "but all of those luxuries are the reason why we moved to SV!", but in response I say all of those luxuries are reasons massing together in SV is so harmful. First, it colors our worldview to think our life is normal. Secondly, it ignores everyone else in the world and the real problems they have.
I'm not even talking about segregating races and ethnicities. I'm sure there's plenty of diversity of skin color and ethnic background in SV. But there's a lot more diversity that exists than the ones the law says you have to respect. And their problems aren't being solved by people in SV, because people in SV don't even know they exist.
Assuming you want to make as much money as possible, focusing on the problems of the portion of the population that makes the most money seems most efficient, i.e. educated professionals in urban areas.
> The simple fact is people primarily like being near people like themselves, culturally or otherwise.
Unless, of course, they don't. :) I can't stand talking shop outside of work. Silicon valley and San Francisco are so full of technologists and associated ancillary professions it's a pretty miserable place to live--they've displaced all the people I'd normally want to be around.
Not that I have much choice on where to work or live! I work in technology, so why would I want to live anywhere else? Just shut up and move to SF already, you'll love it!
Culturally though, people do for the most part. Whites hangout with Whites, Indians with Indians, Chinese with Chinese, etc.. it's not racism, it's human nature.
I believe the issue that deserves some scrutiny is hinges on on what you say is "...a natural phenomenon."
SV and the bay are magnets for individuals who possess a high concentration of capital, both social and economic. Those forms of wealth allow those individuals to shape the environment and self-select in ways that other groups of individuals don't have access to. I believe this in turn leads to a level of social isolation not experienced by others who are unable to be inside their beautiful apartment on the 4th floor, one uber ride and three keyswipes and two neighborhoods away from the other individuals who can't afford those things. That level of isolation in my opinion can easily lead to a lack of awareness of the lives of other individuals.
The people in little Korea, little Ethiopia etc. may self select based on language and culture but I'd say they're all share a lot more exposure to a similar set of problems than the lion's share of residents in SV. I think what's good about this is that is has the potential to more quickly lead to a larger sense of solidarity with all individuals.
> Those forms of wealth allow those individuals to shape the environment and self-select in ways that other groups of individuals don't have access to.
Oh please, I just reread Grapes of Wrath and other literature about the Dust Bowl migration to California and it didn't take wealth for some of the poorest Americans to form or shape communities as they came to California. The key was they were hard working and dedicated. All it took was people of similar culture coming together and investing/supporting their own community. Eventually getting their own jobs, land, political support, and assimilating into California culture... eventually becoming locals themselves.
The 'local' people in California were just as hostile to those newcomers, they saw the 'Okies' as 'uneducated and dirty' who didn't belong. Not much different from the way SF activists are to tech workers... except the classes were reversed.
Or the 'carpetbaggers' coming from the Northeast US down into the Southern US following the civil war.
It's not a new phenomenon for newcomers to feel isolation from 'locals' nor for locals to resist change. People always resist change. While it gets justified in many ways by guilt, jealousy, nostalgia, fear of competition, etc, etc. It is not fundamentally about wealth. It has a combination of many issues, but largely has do with things being different.
Reducing every social/economic issue to class, wealth, and power is fraught with issues and requires ignoring plenty of evidence and counter-examples. Much of "new left" ideology and literature is famous for being reductionist in this way. The SF activist's approach to this issue is no different.
Because "people" move there for the jobs. No one I know said, "Hey, I want to live in the Bay Area for homogenous techie-elitism."
I moved to the Bay Area from the midwest and was frankly shocked at the lack of Black people in the area. That said, my trips back to my roots have left me wondering where all the Asians are....
Yep you're right, it's just as much the fault of the corporations that are there. Startups are a big part of it, moving to SV just to form a startup locks a ton of qualified people out and unnecessarily jacks up your burn rate. You'd be far better off moving to Madison and hiring from University of Wisconsin where you still have Whole Foods and Trader Joes and a bike-friendly city and great public transport but your employees can buy their own house for $100k.
But people are part of the problem too. People move to SV to work for Google and Apple and Facebook but these aren't the only tech employers in the country. Sticking with Madison, Epic is huge and very high-tech. Ann Arbor MI has Duo, Arbor Networks, and Trove among many. And these places pay pretty darn well for the area, which means you're going to be taking home a lot more disposable income than you would in SV. The only downside is you won't be working for Google/Apple/Facebook, and you'd have to live in the Midwest which means dealing with other people. You might even have to shop at shudder Walmart.
"People" move there for the jobs... because that's where people just like them work. But I'll bet there's somewhere closer to home where they can work with people just like them but also experience other people frequently, make more money, work on just as interesting of projects, and come out better because of the experience.
>which means you're going to be taking home a lot more disposable income than you would in SV.
Rolling the dice in SV will result in much bigger winnings more often than it will in other areas. That's worth something, and obviously people are willing to pay for it (give up some things).
Rolling the dice as in founding a startup? For sure. But that's mainly because all the VCs are are in SV and some of them force you to be there too (looking at you YC...). Startups outside of SV need to be profitable from day one[0] because there aren't too many people out here willing to throw millions of dollars at unprofitable ideas.
The ones rolling the dice are the VCs. Everyone else, founders included, are just slot machines. Your odds of hitting a jackpot in SV are higher than anywhere else, but so are your odds of losing everything. Elsewhere, you might not hit a jackpot and become a unicorn, but is a focus on slow and profitable growth really a net negative?
San Fransisco never forgot their gold rush heritage, and just like back then, the miners come looking for a fortune but the only ones reliably getting rich are the tavern owners.
Exactly. There are lots of great reasons to justify it. Higher wages offset the cost of living (which can't be caused by the rising wages, right?) and has the side effect of locking out anyone who can't or won't work for a tech company, driving them from the homes they can no longer afford, ensuring that the next person who moves in there will be just like me.
Personally I wouldn't want to live anywhere else. Because anywhere else there are other kinds of people, doing other kinds of things and living other kinds of lives. Can't have that, it would bring down my paycheck. Gotta have that network effect, and of course by network effect, I mean people who are just like me.
I think you’re being too cynical. I grew up in Ohio. Mostly I knew white people who also were born there and mostly knew white people themselves. This is 180* from the Bay Area.
Sure, the enormous tech economy makes for a bit of an industrial monoculture. But if you start talking to people about things other than what they do for a living you’ll hear a lot of interesting stories.
I am being too cynical, you're right. I'm pushing into the hyperbole territory to try to make my point as clear as possible.
Diversity isn't how many black people you know. And it's not a perfect line of "SV is awful, everywhere else is better". Some places around the country are better for your soul than others, and the best way to experience life is by visiting places, spending time in places where people live drastically different lives than you do. Bonus points if you're a minority (a rich person living in a poor town, a poor person living in a rich town, black living in a white area, white living in a black area, conservative living in a liberal area, you get the idea).
Point is, congregating everyone of a type in one area leads to a monoculture which is dangerous. Race doesn't matter nearly as much as economic class, and making well-paying tech jobs centralized in one area for really no good reason does very little to help. If people going to SV are so willing to move to somewhere new for work, does it really all have to be the exact same place? With a ton of other people just like them?
Interesting conversation. I don’t think a choice of work defines somebody as much as you are suggesting.
Also, there are loads of people in sfba that are not wealthy tech workers. You blame the region and our group think but it’s maybe partly your personal bubble?
One of the things we've found most exciting about matching carpoolers together is the organic way in which people from totally different backgrounds (genders, ethnicities, nationalities, professions) get paired up on a simple ride to work.
After all, carpooling, when done right, really starts with just basic geography - who is near you, and who is not.
We've seen incredible stories of the people we're connecting - from job advice to new tennis partners -- and even consolation over lost loved ones. One of the beautiful things of that type of community (that we think we have with Scoop) is it's an unexpected forcing function to look outside your normal bubble - which seems harder and harder to come by these days.
I live in Israel in a city called Modiin and use public transportion to visit client offices out of town.
The public transportation by train to Tel Aviv, Hertzelia and Haifa is great, but anything else is somewhere between terrible and nonexistent. In the past year I use Waze Carpool and Moovit ( https://www.moovitapp.com/ , both developed and beta tested/dog-fooded in Israel) to get to those "unreachable" destinations at random schedules. A few times the results have been amazingly positive - being able to carpool with someone that lives just next to me and by chance needs to arrive exactly to my destination at the same time - and for the fraction of the price or the hassle of any other transportation method!
In fact - two of these drivers told me their family have gone down from two cars to a single car since using Waze Carpool, Moovit and public transportation to commute on a daily basis - a surprising statement from people living in a suburb such as Modiin. Once I was carpooled by a driver that responded to my request within 5 minutes and spent at least extra 25 minutes just to pick me up from a random spot in Jeruslaem for a 35 minute journey leaving me at my doorstep - saving me at least an hour, and probably for less than I would have paid for a bus.
However: The app suffers from various minor glitches. For example: Whe I installed the app I have selected "Home" and "Work" addresses, having one of my client's offices as "Work". Since then I keep getting daily notification with suggestions for riding back and forth to my "Office" although I do not commute there daily. The app does not include any option to control those notifications or disable the "Work" address. Customer support did respond quickly to my problem, but did not supply a good solution.
I was in Israel last year and they just love Waze. Everything is Waze this and Waze that. They have an absolute belief in Waze as a brand. Most have no idea it is owned by Google, nor seemed very interested when I mentioned it.
So I'd say if they can get this working anywhere, it will be in a traffic-riddled country full of people who obsess over journey times and who absolutely love this brand.
waze in Israel shows ads on the screen every time your speed is close to stopped, and then slide them up when you start moving.
it's awful. irresponsible. and gave me lots of anxiety every single time. it's probably fine for people that just want traffic info, but for actual gps guidance usage it is hell.
I see that here in the US as well. Ads for fast food restaurants or movies, quite often. Interacting with the ad would navigate you to the nearest restaurant, or theatre playing that film.
Can confirm. Just like "Kleenex" in some places, Waze has become the generic term for GPS Navigation here in Israel. Honestly, I have no idea why people still use it when Google Maps has an infinitely better interface and no ads.
- Waze is a bit more dynamic/aggressive in finding me alternatives when traffic patterns can change due to accidents
- "speed trap reported ahead"
- the "turn left" direction is better timed than Google, Google will tell you to turn while your turn's still a bit far off, sometimes you'd turn into the street before.
- loyalty, Waze was great before Google bought it and used its reports and traffic data, and it's still great even now.
I agree with your Kleenex sentiment, quite a number of people who know their way home, still use Waze for the alerts and reports.
I wish Google gave directions like "take the third left" instead of "in 1500 feet..". I don't know what 1500 feet looks like, and the mile amounts I can only estimate when I'm going around 60mph and 1 mile=1 minute.
I get this in dense areas now. I will still get "in a half mile turn left on X street", but when it actually gives me "turn left" I will instead get "take the next left" or "take the second left" if there are multiple streets close together on the left.
When I was less used to using it, it would say "in 1500 feet turn" and then there would be a turn right there, and I'd think that was it, but it wasn't. I had to start gauging how far they meant by it. It does say "second turn" but only when the roads are very close. It would be better if it just always used that instead of these absolute numbers.
Google maps has ads, it's just not so in-your-face as Waze is. Search for stuff and depending on the topic the result list will have an item with a purple "Ad" tag on it (I searched for "tires" and got a hit for a tire store tagged as an ad).
I agree that gmaps has a better interface, at least for routing. I vastly prefer the alternative routes implementation on gmaps (it's right on the map). In waze I need to click through a few screens, which isn't practical when I'm driving. In gmaps I can glance at the map and make a decision without touching the phone at all.
In addition to the routing being better in Waze as others have commented, Waze gives you a heads up on potholes, speed traps, red light cameras, etc. I don't believe those features exist in Google Maps.
In addition to what my sibling posters said, the crowd-sourced speed trap notices are awesome and very, very helpful for those of us that have to make long drives on the open road at times.
This doesn't need to be a centralized service. People could organize things among themselves. There are carpooling sites, but it requires a critical mass to be useful.
Why don't we hire a bunch of experts to figure out what the most common and efficient routes are for the most people and then hire people to run those routes regularly?
Oops I just invented buses again, just the rest of these transportation startups eventually end up doing.
The extremely boring answer to our transportation problems is to properly fund public transportation. We've known the solution for ages, but it's kept down by the wealthy class who don't want to pay for public works that would benefit everyone.
> The extremely boring answer to our transportation problems is to properly fund public transportation. We've known the solution for ages, but it's kept down by the wealthy class who don't want to pay for public works that would benefit everyone.
I'd say the middle class are the real problem.
You see, the primary reason why transit costs so much in taxes is because few people ride it. Few people ride it because driving is heavily subsidized. Since transit is a step-fixed cost business, the marginal cost of a new rider is nearly zero. A bus running at 20% capacity might be 50% subsidized, but a bus running at 80% capacity might be making a 30% profit.
If the cost drivers incurred matched the costs they impose on society, driving would be extremely expensive in comparison, and drivers would flock to transit in droves, completely changing the necessity for subsidizing transit...either reducing it, eliminating it, or even making it wildly profitable as the streetcar barons found out before driving was subsidized.
However, if you propose raising gas taxes so that driving actually covers its costs, the concern trolls come out of the woodwork about taxes hurting the working poor, no doubt completely unconcerned about how much their comfortable middle class household would have to pay.
But here's a proposal: raise the gas tax, but refund the increase in costs on a means-tested basis. Poof, there goes the concern trolling, but the middle class is still on the hook and they really don't like it, because it might mean that they have to make different decisions about their lifestyle and location and habits.
> But here's a proposal: raise the gas tax, but refund the increase in costs on a means-tested basis. Poof, there goes the concern trolling, but the middle class is still on the hook and they really don't like it, because it might mean that they have to make different decisions about their lifestyle and location and habits
The theory is sound, but the devil is in the implementation here. Some of the largest metropolitan areas in the US (and by extension the entire world) were built around the car, not public transit. The cost to implement effective transit in such suburban sprawls is exorbitant when compared with densely packed urban areas such as NYC or Vancouver for example. There's just too much pre-existing residential area to cover effectively. I don't think it can actually be done in such an area in a way that wouldn't be exponentially less convenient than a car.
Additionally, due to the size of these cities and the number of people living in them, you're talking about completely upending the lives of quite literally tens of millions of people.
If gas is $8 a gallon, should I move closer to where my office is? What if I get a different job? In Los Angeles for instance, there's not one central business district where I can generally expect to find work. The difference between Downtown and Santa Monica in Los Angeles is over an hour during rush hour.
What about my spouse, if I have one? What if their job is in the opposite direction? Should we split the difference? What if there's no suitable housing in between the two locations? Are we going to move every time one of us changes jobs (every 3-5 years on average)? What if we have children? Do we put them in a different school every time we move? What if the schools in the area we're moving to are worse then where we are now? What about after-school activities? These are all very real issues for most lower to upper middle class Americans.
And again, you need to multiply these problems by literally tens of millions of people. It's just not feasible to price people out of their own vehicles without giving them a reasonable alternative. The demographic we're discussing here usually votes, and there's no way they'd sit still for that. I know I wouldn't, simply because Los Angeles would become unlivable overnight.
Do you suggest to destroy middle class? It was done before and didn't end well.
The real issue with public transportation is convenience. The public transportation is trying to optimize for the most common transportation patterns. In reality, this doesn't work very well because 1) it turns out that there are more slices than we can efficiently support; 2) the patterns change faster than we can adjust the service (e.g. during the day).
Carpool/ridesharing is trying to find the middle ground between 100 routes / 100 passengers each; and 10,000 routes / 1 passenger.
Re "driving cost", the public transportation is usually heavily subsidized from taxes. The actual costs per transported passenger per mile are significantly hire than cars (in US). What you are describing as "driving cost" is a tax on drivers which also covers public transportation (partially). In reality, fully commercial public transportation is profitable in very few routes that doesn't cover the needs of all the people.
You'd be destroying a culture of independence in the US punishing car drivers so much, and I don't think it would be nearly worth it. I greatly appreciate being able to just go where I want without having to be beholden to public transit schedules and share the space with a bunch of strangers, and have my own temperature controls etc.
The "cost" cars have to society and how "subsidized" they are is ridiculously overblown around here. I had to pay maybe $400 registering+inspecting my car in NY, transfering to NJ was a few more hundred dollars, I had to pay to take the permit test, insurance was $350/month in NY and it's $115/month in NJ, taxes used for roads benefit transit too obviously, and bad drivers pay their externalities in tickets and insurance settlements.
> You'd be destroying a culture of independence in the US punishing car drivers so much, and I don't think it would be nearly worth it.
Is it really independence if you can't cover the costs you impose? Sounds an awful lot like the "oppression" felt by angsty teenagers without jobs when they're told they have to empty a dishwasher.
> I greatly appreciate being able to just go where I want without having to be beholden to public transit schedules and share the space with a bunch of strangers, and have my own temperature controls etc.
I'm sure you do. I'd greatly appreciate being able to fly private, for all of the same reasons, but unfortunately I can't afford it. If you want it, you should pay the cost to get it. And that cost is gonna be about $6/gallon in extra taxes.
> The "cost" cars have to society and how "subsidized" they are is ridiculously overblown around here. [...]
Still not enough. As long as cities, states, and the federal government are taking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the general fund to build and maintain roads, you aren't even close to covering your costs. And that would be before congestion charges, carbon taxes, appropriately priced bridge tolls, etc.
What is overblown is the independence and financial responsibility of the average person who merely pays their bills for actions that are heavily subsidized.
It's fine for things to be subsidized and taxes collected so that a way of life is more attainable, that's how societies work. In all likelihood I'm subsidizing the people around here who use NJ transit in place of driving - I hardly have my car on for more than 10 minutes a day and it's around 30mpg. It's just part of a larger give-and-take that we all participate in, I pay for trains I don't use today and they pay for state parks they don't use tomorrow. Are you opposed to all government subsidies? It's not tenable for everybody to pay the full cost of everything they do. A prime example is healthcare.
It's not okay to subsidize things in general, and especially things with massive negative externalities (like cars), when the person using that subsidy can easily afford it. And let's face it, the middle class can easily afford $8/gallon. Nobody wants to pay that, but they can afford it. As a proof that people can afford it, we have dozens of first world counties with strong middle classes that correctly price their road taxes. They do just fine.
I've never understood the idea that we should just cross subsidize every single thing we can. It's absurd. Prices affect decisions, and when artificially low prices induce people to collectively make decisions that are bad for society, we should stop fucking subsidizing it.
Imagine how much better our government would be if we took all of the taxes we take in, and stopped spending it all on things that are bad for society on behalf of people that can afford it or don't need it, and started spending it all on things that are good for society on behalf of people that need it but can't afford it.
Replying to the lowest level comment because this is the one where you call it out specifically.
These subsidies aren't driven by an outcry from the population, they're driven by groups of companies lobbying the government. Car companies would almost certainly lobby against reducing gas subsidies - it would cause people to reconsider buying a car.
Lobbyists will also be on the lookout for services like waze carpool because it has the potential to cut in on their business (transit and taxis).
I prefer a society with car subsidies and the freedom it brings to one with the alleged externalities more compensated for where people are priced into having to settle for transit. Freedom isn't free, as they say. More investment in infrastructure for electric vehicles, like charging stations, and incentives to use them (like NJ already does with waived inspections for example) are a fine compromise.
Additionally, with such taxes on car use, I'm sure a lot of people would just go places less and thus participate in the economy less, rather than take transit. A direct comparison to another country with prohibitive gas taxes isn't perfectly predictive of what would happen here because of cultural and infrastructural differences.
If by highly subsidized you mean taxed at a rate set in 1993 and not updated since, nor pinned to inflation, then yes gas[oline]/petrol is highly subsidized in the US[0]. Also fuel taxes rates in Europe are much higher[1]. You'll notice the US pays $0.46/3.78L(gallon) on average for federal+ state fuel tax, while Europe pays $1.24/L($4.69/gallon). That's an order of magnitude in higher fuel taxes.
I also think we should be taxing gasoline at rates closer to what EU states tax, to help better cover the negative societal/environmental of burning fossil fuels.
Going further than this it would be better to implement a form of comprehensive road pricing, since as cars become more efficient and electric cars become more popular, the revenue generation ability of the gas tax weakens.
And the bus is really slow (many stops, multiple bus changes to get to a final destination, infrequent runs) compared to driving, and you don't get to choose who your fellow riders are. These are not my qualms, but the ones I hear most often as the basic reason why people hate on riding the bus. Money is certainly a factor, but it's not the whole story here.
These are implementation details tied to low funding and car oriented infrastructure. For example a bus route becomes significantly faster when it has dedicated lanes and doesn't need to share the lane with cars.
> These are implementation details tied to low funding and car oriented infrastructure
No, it’s fundamental to the technology. The deadweight cost of the driver mandates a minimum economic size. If you have a big bus, you need a route with lots of people. My long and skinny Cupertino —> Mountain View 6AM/9PM will ne inefficient, or the system will be inefficient—no other options with big buses.
A derogatory comparison to Uber is appropriate; it’s amortising the same driver across fewer people. Comparing busses to carpooling is not; I get from and to my precise destination, minimal walking or transferring, and take up no deadweight driver. If you want, think of carpooling as mutualised modularised busses.
Low ridership routes are a necessary part of a complete public transit system. The reluctance to subsidize low ridership routes is part of what creates a poor mass transit system. The result in a limited public transit system that doesn't match people's needs and people turn to cars. This is exactly what I'm talking about.
What’s amazing is that rural parts of Guatemala have a better public transport system than some of the wealthiest cities on earth. The chicken bus system is a marvel of low tech, self organizing systems.
This is what waze should do. It already knows enough to say "hey, there is a person living within 500m of your home that drives almost to the same place almost exactly the same time every day".
Google Maps already provides this but with public transit -- real-time notifications of when your bus/train is departing for going home/work.
Granted that you have to explicitly set home/work addresses and what your regular departure time ranges (eg: go to work between 7-8am and go home between 5-6pm).
Tbh this sounds exactly like what you're describing but with public car-pooling substituted for public transit.
I worked for a state sponsored carpool app for nearly 5 years in the late aughts/early 10s. This is exactly what I had wanted to build, but the state didn't want to take a risk on mobile and ended up hiring a contractor to develop a web app. The contractor went out of business one year into a five year contract.
I still have an interest in Transportation Demand Management, but can't stand the industry because it's almost always state sponsored and several steps behind in terms of innovation. This is really cool and I hope that it catches on.
We had a similar service 20-30 years ago operating mostly out of Quebec and Ontario (Canada). Sadly regulators did not see it very kindly (http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/province-stops-allo-stop-1.211...). Story does not say though how thik was the kraft envelop that was exchanged, if there was ever such exchange, or was just an overzealous civil servant. The service had been operating for some time already and was quite successful and popular. That decision came out of nowhere and the service was forced to stop operations. All this well before smart phones apps and the web... well technically the web was present but the service had started well before that and was mostly operating with phone calls to an actual office and bulletin boards and such.
For Allo-Stop yes there was exchange of money but the amounts were such that it would be barely more than the split expenses for gas for the trip.
Wonder if this will be allowed, seeing how Uber is being forced to get taxi licences and such for it's drivers, I doubt this will go very far around here.
>The board found the Montreal-based company was illegally competing with the Voyageur, Greyhound and Trentway bus companies.
>Felix D'Mello is with the Ontario Highway Transport Board, which controls passenger transportation in the province. He says because money is exchanged, it's a public transportation service, and that breaks the rules.
What a revolting crock of crap - politicians outright protecting established business interests. I guess in such locations Google can still implement a free service, and let users settle the price themselves, it's suboptimal but regulators can't outright kill it, unlike Uber.
Waze carpool launched ~2Y ago in Israel. I've been a registered driver/passenger for about a year now. Here's my summary:
- I don't like the fact it's a separate app rather than part of waze.
- Apparently matching rides is technically non-trivial. I was hit with so many false positives I could not cope and had to deregister (as a driver).
- Car sharing is culturally challenging, even in Israel. I guess more so in the US.
- This will no work.
In Seattle or other cities where traffic congestion is such a problem, I'd take someone for free if I could drive in the carpool lanes. I can even imagine someone who could be paid for just being a body in the car by someone really well off.
Slugging doesn't seem to really exist on a sustained basis anywhere other than NoVa. My guess is that it requires a specific set of circumstances to take off: SOV commutes need to be generally feasible (so that you have drivers), HOV lanes need to exist (so that drivers have a reason to pick up passengers), you need specific job loci (to make driver/passenger matching exist), and you need commuter buses (to provide the passengers).
The Pentagon and I-395 provide one of the most optimal conditions for slugging, with the added bonus that you have effectively direct access ramps from Springfield and the Pentagon that completely bypass the regular lanes. Since I-66 was HOV-only during the rush hour until recently, that probably retarded the existence of slugging despite HOV lanes (since the SOV backup wasn't so feasible). Similarly, the lack of HOV lanes in MD (save for 270) also retard the impetus for slugging.
Are carpool lanes that common? I've heard of their existence, but I'm not sure I've ever seen one anywhere (Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, France or Finland, that is).
Depending on what part of Seattle you commute to, you should definitely try out Scoop and see what you think! There are thousands of commuters in the King County area using Scoop (https://www.takescoop.com) already to turn their trips to work into meaningful time and take advantage of HOV lanes.
Folks from Silicon Valley should ask VCs to sponsor them trip to Europe, where what they are essentially to solve is addressed. It's called public transportation.
Why don't they go global? I'm guessing "money exchanged" is the problem, but I'd happily give away that[+]. Give me a reason to trust the "carpooler" and that's all I ask. Heck, allow me to easily coordinate with my colleagues, and that'd still be a gain.
[+] I don't care for the money, in the grand scheme of things you earn nothing from this, I'd rather have the gratitude of the rider; In fact, that's how I do it today when I pick a hitchhiker, I never take their money anyway.
Blablacar works for long trips. My understanding is that Whatsapp was targeted to the daily commute. I don't know anybody that uses blablacar for that, nor is it optimized for it.
Offtopic: that first sentence sounds very weird, I think your syntax got messed up. Use two enters to get a blank line in between. You can't do something on the next line (this is not real markdown). See: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
I like this idea. I feel like many states already have hotlines you can call to get matched with a carpool (I'm fairly certain NY does at least), and so to me this seems like the natural progression of things. Plus, the fact that the driver would get a small amount of money would create incentive to sign up, but not create a new market like Uber/Lyft did. I'm interested to see what comes of this.
This has been the promise of Waze and their competitors since they very first went into business. I'll be fascinated to see if it works out. While on paper it's a no-brainer (cheaper for everyone involved, and potentially faster when using carpool lanes), the less tangible aspects of it (what if you hate the person who's car your stuck in for an hour? Will people sacrifice control over their timings, especially on the way home? etc. etc.) won't really be fully understood until this is actually being used properly by a lot of people.
While true, I feel like that is just how carpooling mechanics work. When there is a way for you to be randomly paired with strangers for a commute to and from work, you always run the risk of not liking someone. I'm more interested if there would be any penalty for the driver leaving without you because you took too long or something. With something that is so easy to sign up for, one would assume that feedback and accountability would also be easier to handle than previously
I don't know where you live but in my country (France), carpooling is very popular. Waze being a very popular application here, it's very probable that they manage to take on BlaBlaCar which basicly has a monopoly when it comes to carpooling here.
I've always wondered why something like BlaBlaCar does not exist in the US. Or why BlaBlaCar does not expand to the US.
True, people are more used to taking domestic flights because of distances but I can think of routes, such as between NYC and Boston, where carpooling could be a good alternative to the train and cheap buses. I'm sure there are others too.
Downtown to downtown, bus is pretty cheap though. They all advertise low-ball rates and I'm not sure what a more realistic price is but it seems to be in the range of $20-$40 or so.
> BlaBlaCar which basicly has a monopoly when it comes to carpooling here
Wait, BlaBlaCar is actually a brand and not a placeholder for "some car[pooling] company"? Because blabla is how we write "blah blah" in dutch (n.b. "bla bla" also works in dutch).
It'll 100% get used in DC to get around the $30 tolls on 66. They already have "sluglines" where people pick up strangers so they can drive on the hov lane.
And this practice has been going on informally since the 70's when the first HOV lanes were opened. I have used it before and although the first few rides might feel awkward, you get used to it quickly and it's a great improvement over driving in traffic. It might have been easier to start here though because almost everyone who uses it on the route I take is going to the Pentagon, so the drivers and riders are fairly homogenous.
I hope so. Most large metro areas sponsor carpool matching programs, though they're usually administered/marketed through the worksite. A lot areas also sponsor a guaranteed ride home program too so that if you carpool to work and for some reason can't carpool home, your cab/transit fare will be reimbursed.
I think it would be better if you gave drivers/customers complete control over everything.
Let drivers choose their pick up area (like a circle on a map), drop off area, price, pickup time (15-minute window), whitelist/blacklist customers, etc.
Then riders can see what drivers are offering and decide if it's worth it. Riders could also post requests that drivers could bid for.
This is a really great discussion on carpooling and our team is stoked to see it. At Scoop (https://www.takescoop.com), we've been working to make carpooling convenient and enjoyable since early 2015. We love seeing more (and bigger!) companies prioritize tackling the problems commuters face getting to work every day.
We're really passionate about some of the topics that have come up in this thread. Our ScoopCare team (real people!) is available throughout the day to help make sure Scoop commuters are having the best possible commute experience. Support availability is critical.
When it comes to safety, Scoop has performed Motor Vehicle history reports on every Driver in the community since day 1 - no one ever drives in a Scoop carpool without a great driving record. We're the only carpool company to ever do that, which is something we're pretty proud to say.
And most importantly, Scoop is for everyone. You don't have to work at a big company or a white collar job -- that's why it's been so important to us to partner with local governments, transit organizations like BART here in the Bay Area, and business parks with 100s of employers -- in addition to major employers.
The more than 2 million trips taken to-date with Scoop have included commuters from all walks of life who are looking for a meaningful commute. The only thing you have to believe is that there is a better way to spend your time on the road.
I'll also be watching this thread for a bit so feel free to reply here!
---
Full disclosure: I started Scoop with my brother, Rob --- and as an avid HN reader, I wanted to comment directly to the HN community. We're really excited to be solving a problem that impacts both SV and the world and would love for you to join us.
I have been a happy Scoop/waze customer for sometime.I also run a 70 people non-profit vanpool for my employer in SF bay area and we supplement Scoop/Waze for timings when our vans do not operate.
Scoop seems to be a very humane company in the sense that rather then focusing ONLY on algorithms they have spend the time to build human partnerships.
Disclaimer : I have no relationship whatsoever to Scoop.I just like appreciating companies when they are trying to do the right think and thinking differently to solve difficult problems.
Best of luck to the scoop team.keep up the good work
I use this in LA, its great because there is no bus that travels along my commute. I hope this will see an influx of users, sometimes it's still hard to find a ride
Blancride in particular had a slick app. Unfortunately, I tried it a few times and never had a good. People flaked at the last minute, wanted me (the driver) to wait a long time, etc.
Don't forget https://www.poparide.com (disclaimer, I'm the founder), we started in British Columbia and are now active in Ontario and Québec, with over 75,000 members.
Our model is closer to BlaBlaCar's in Europe (longer distance) but we do see people using our app to commute to work, usually on distances of 50 miles or more.
BlaBlaCar is actually a long-distance carpooling app, whereas Waze, Lyft Line and Uber Pool are all targeting the shorter-distance, daily commuters.
BlaBlaCar does have a product in market for shorter trips, it's called BlaBlaLines: https://www.blablalines.com/ - although it's unclear what the adoption has been since they launched last year in 2017 in France.
The challenge with shorter-distance, shared commutes is finding people who are leaving and arriving at the same location. This is because people are not very flexible when it comes to heading and coming back from work: they need to get there on time, without any detours or delays.
This means that typically, you'd need to get people working at the same company or in the same building to create a successful carpooling program. Making it work outside of the scope of a regular schedule is very difficult.
This is why companies like Uber and Lyft pay drivers to show up on demand, as in this model, you have more control over the supply-side of the marketplace, providing a more predictable experience for passengers.
It'll be interesting to see how this goes, as Waze has a very strong community of drivers. It's a challenge though, as some mentioned in this post, in that there is decent overhead in managing drivers, passengers, conflicts and everything that comes with building an online marketplace with a community angle.
Disclaimer: I'm the CEO and Co-founder of https://www.poparide.com, a long-distance carpooling platform of 75,000 members based in Vancouver, BC (Canada) and our model is similar to BlaBlaCar's, we aim to fill empty seats in cars on intercity trips in Canada.
I spent about 3 months in Europe and I was totally amazed with the efficiency of BlaBlaCar! That actually ended up inspiring me to work on http://www.thetripbuddyapp.com/ - To be honest I wished transportation in the US was as efficient as Europe.
They do a pretty good job of explaining it in the FAQ - but this app is not exactly the same as Lyft and Uber. The biggest thing is that the Waze doesn't collect a fee, and the fee drivers collect is currently set not to exceed the IRS defined limit on per mile transportation deductions.
Also only in CA, TX, and Israel for now. If it comes to my state, this would be cheaper than a bus for my commute.
> What happens if the person doesn't show and you are late to work?
Likely the same thing that happens today when public transit is delayed or your car breaks down. I.e. It's your personal responsibility. Reliability of the specific mode of transit should be taken into consideration.
Google Carpool has been available in Israel for a while now. I've used it, it works great. The only problem is there aren't enough drivers here (supply). I've also used Moovit Carpool for getting rides, which works basically on the same principle, and it is great. Carpools are as "insecure" as Airbnb and Uber. It's all part of the sharing economy. I've met really interesting people in my carpools. Both companies have support in case of issues etc. I totally recommend trying out this concept. The only challenge seems to be building up a big enough database of drivers.
Waze and Wazer? As in rhymes with laze and laser. It reads a bit like wazzer as in 'one who is known for urinating', I suppose?
To my British eyes I can't help but read 'wazzock', as in a 1980's schoolboy insult par excellence[0]. To rescue this comment with a semblance of an arguement, what I'm trying to say is that maybe it's best to try the name in a few languages/dialects before you go with it. [0]https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/wazzock
Naming things is hard. There's not a large supply of 4 letter words that would serve as a succinct label for what Waze purports to do. Considering Waze was sold for $1.3B, the founders probably aren't too worried about the disadvantages of the name in the UK.
It looks just like Carma carpool[1], at least what they were attempting a couple years ago. They've been around a while, but I guess never had the network critical mass to really make it take off.
I've wanted to use a service like this for a while. I commute ~35 minutes solo in my own car, and it's just wasteful and needlessly costly.
Think about operating a business where coordination is required, such as factories, or where meetings need to be conducted such as legal or finance firms. Also, children are in school at a set time with a set schedule, for obvious reasons, so their parents prefer also have a schedule.
I can speak from my own experience, I've been using Scoop for like 5mo now, it's very good in matching. I live in Bay Area and 25mi commute could be 40-90min.
I tried Waze Carpool many times until I finally gave up - they tend to offer ridiculous matches - way out of my route for both pick up and drop off.
Just stumbled on this the other day from wanting to build this very similar idea (e.g. BlaBlaCar in Europe) not just for commuting [to or from work] but general travel- ride to the grocery store, movies, etc. I decided to see if RideWith.com resolved to anything and boom... ended up on Waze Carpool
Is this something new? Or is it old news? If nothing has changed, it's unusable for much of the United States. I live in rural Oregon, and it could be a helpful service. Last I checked, it was restricted and not available.
I wonder what proportion of drivers will be actually heading somewhere, as opposed to the primary purpose of the journey being to make money from Waze Carpool.
I think teams are basically allowed to use whatever makes sense for them. Although there may have been a problem with React's licensing before they changed it.
Same goes for Facebook. I remember they did something within the last year or so that used Vue.
not sure if you're involved with this app, but I've tried 10 different selfies from multiple locations and the app doesn't accept any of them as a profile photo. Whatever algorithm you're using for determining if photos are acceptable does not work at all.
It's hilarious that this came out the day after Steve Yegge lambasted Google for failing to innovate. This is a perfect example of Google arriving half way through the race. Everyone else is on the final lap, they're on the first, and they think they're running neck and neck.
A few month ago I would have read your comment and thought that bus can't really compete for the fine grained point to point transportation.
Then I went to Sydney in December. The public transportation system there is super impressive. You have a location-based app where you can tell you want to go from point A to point B (from an address, a click on the map, your favorites), it will instantly provide you with many options, with time, duration and price, showing you where to take it from.
It seems there are buses every 5 minutes. During the route the app will buzz you 2 and 1 stop before your actual stop. Oh, and the bus card allow you to take the light train and the ferry. You can also check your credits directly in the app, even recharge it I think.
It changed my perspective on how to use public transportation. In Los Angeles for example I would check which bus/train I should take, download the timetable to see the frequency and where to stop. In Sydney, I got confident in a way that I would just stop caring about planning first. Just open the app and it'll tell you how to go where you want to go.
It's amazing how many other places have figured out how to make this work. Even in sprawling cities like Berlin, which was cut in half by a wall for 30 years, it's clean, well maintained, goes nearly everywhere and costs the commuter about as much as a tank of gas a week for unlimited travel.
Americans have really failed to capture and maintain a civic imaginary.
Oh man, wait 'til ya get over to Seoul/HK/Tokyo/<insert Asian megacity>. In Seoul particularly (maybe others, I only lived here), the government has opened hundreds to thousands of public APIs (e.g. transit; bus/subway current locations, timetables, routes, etc) for public consumption and there's now a ton of different apps to serve different needs and you're free to build your own if none suit you. Even nicer is that they've centralized all of it so you can sign up and manage access to all these APIs via a single platform.
Hong Kong is this way, too. People gush about the train system in Tokyo (which I have love for) but the sheer number of fast, frequent, and comfortable ways to get around in HK edge it out for me.
It seems like every 5 meters there’s a bus stop, and the busses are not old style clunkers but double deckers like Googles take.
Eh, you can do the same as most of these features you mention with normal apps. At least where I live in SF, Google Maps can tell you all the different public transportation routes, times, and fares, as well as a notification for when to leave, etc.
The Transit app is also really useful for this.
It's just the public transit systems that need improvement, but the rider side isn't too bad.
I was excited to try this, but it seems broken. Every pair of locations I give it returns "No routes found", even for stops that are directly connected by a single bus route that I can see in its database.
Wait until you get to Bogota, the bus service there is nothing short of mind blowing. Buses arrive so fast you wonder if they are attached by some kind of invisible link.
Vancouver is same in regards to the service but strangely the position-tracking of a bus is more accurate on mobile google maps than the official 'transit' app, although the former says the source of data is latter.
There is an app for that, it's called Moovit and works in any city - the key thing being that there needs to be an actual functional transit system with solid timetables in place to get the Sydney level of service.
Maybe cities should start running a "luxury service" tier along the bus lines that charges 3x the fare, has cushioned seats, etc. Need a smart phone to request a stop. Make it once an hour or so and a sleek black and silver exclusive color. Don't even call it a bus, rebrand it as the stress-free shuttle and get a few celebrities to be "spotted" on them.
The acrobatics people go through in order to consider themselves rich and successful.
There's a fashion term for this, essentially "low-end luxury" (that's not the term, I forget it). People that are not fabulously wealthy enough to say, hire a chauffeur, not even impressively wealthy enough to always rely on lyft or uber, are marginally wealthy enough to just not take the bus - so they stratify where and what they can as a metric of success.
High end fashion stores sell pendants, socks, scarves, belt buckles, and other minor mementos of wealth at sub-$100 prices (such as a $50 pair of socks). These are some of the most popular items because millions of consumers, if they so desired, could afford to spend $50 on something.
A single pair of socks with the most coveted luxury brand logo, for people who value such things, is a prized purchase.
This is one of the upsides to a socio-economically diverse workforce. If all of your employees come from upper-middle class backgrounds, you'll only solve upper-middle class problems.
You seem to assume that this service is expensive. I'm really not sure why anyone would think that, other than some notion that Larry Page is a comic book villain who hates the poor. It appears to be cheaper than any other commuting option for most people (~55 cents/mile).
Public transit, at least here in the SF Bay Area, is horribly mismanaged. Google does not have the power to force the 37 independent squabbling agencies here to work together, to force BART to kick obvious criminal activity out of their stations, or to fire anyone when new train stations fall behind schedule fifteen times in a row. Companies that provide good services should not be punished for not being magically omnipotent.
Second person I've seen on this thread, and maybe the fiftieth in my whole life experience, who heard "Let's fund public transportation!" and offered, as a counter-argument mind you, "No, public transportation is terrible."
Analogy:
Wife: "Hey let's buy a new toaster!"
Husband: "No way, have you seen how shitty our toaster is?"
People voted. They voted to use Uber and Lyft, not some monopolistic system. Freedom of choice and agile won out over top-down, waterfall.
Public transportation sucks and will continue to suck, even with more funding. People want to pay for something better than it can be at its best, at least in most urban centers in the US.
A lot of places do not have a competent public transportation system or one at all. Public transportation also doesn't satisfy everyone's needs the same way ridesharing does (access to stops, time in transit, etc.). Even though ridesharing competes with public transpo, it does not eliminate it's need.
Surely having a charging wire in your car and connecting it before a long drive is not that hard? It's the main way my Samsung phone charges, I usually go full blast playing internet radio, running Waze etc. and when I arrive my phone is 100% charged.
I always wondered why there isn't there a charging standard for phone mounts/cradles just like the old cordless phones where placing it in the cradle made two metallic leads connect the charging circuit.
The rate in which something goes wrong in the real world (esp where money in exchanged) is much higher than in a pure software world, and Google is going to try to take the FAQ/chatbot/no phone approach to service when it's going to need to staff entire buildings with agents if it doesn't want to completely piss off a nascent user base.