Tag: Transportation

On-Demand Mobility Is Still Expensive

I needed to get home from work late last night and I didn’t have a car. Cry me a river.

So I went to the Palo Alto train station, only to discover that I had read the train schedule on my phone wrong. The next train wasn’t passing through for another 45 minutes.

So I looked up the cost of a ride-share home. The distance is a hair under 15 miles.

Lyft wouldn’t even quote me a price — apparently the ride was out of their service area.

Uber quoted me a price of $50.

The train is $5. I got two slices of pizza and waited for the train.

Maybe this isn’t a good use of time, running the cost benefit analysis. But it was just hard for me to pull the trigger on a $50 ride home.

Facebook Event-Based Ride-Sharing

News just surfaced of a Facebook transportation patent:

“The new feature Facebook appears ready to launch asks its users attending an event to select whether or not they are driving.

If the Facebooker is driving, they can then select their number of passengers, set of potential passengers and departure location, along with a radius of where they would be willing to pick up other passengers.

The social media network will identify potential matches of people needing rides to the same event. If the user selects that he or she needs a ride to the event, Facebook will list friends with seats available.”

To be clear, this is a patent, not an actual, existing feature. Yet.

Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on February 1, 2016.