So you mean, most people absolutely do prefer no delays and a private ride, since the other ~80% of Uber riders don't do the POOL option.
The market exists for both though. It's a smart move to offer this option. It's more energy economical and fiscally responsible. There's certainly even people who have the time but not the money.
The Uber Pool service doesn't require you to actually be matched. If there doesn't happen to be another rider going in the same direction, you still get the cheaper fare and it's counted as an Uber Pool ride.
Pool also appears to be the default option now, so I on a recent trip accidentally got a pool a couple times. I didn't know the first time, and forgot the second.
Second time was also a 'pool' with no additional riders, so it was a happy accident for a cheaper ride. Perhaps people bet on that as well?
If we're imagining a pleasant future where self-driving cars have solved congestion, isn't some kind of car pooling going to be necessary?
It's fundamentally silly for millions of commuters to each travel in their own car, and robot cars aren't going to fix that. Buses make massively more efficient use of road space (when they're reasonably full, anyway).
Robot cars should reduce accidents, and parking problems will go away, but they won't magically reduce congestion on commuter routes. But car-pooling will.
Valid point, car pooling would definitely be a good thing. And I think people would be more willing if it was more efficient than it is. Uber Pool does not seem to match people very well. Scheduled rides could probably be very optimized, so its two minutes out of the way, for each person, and no one really minds. Also optimizations like, if the rider isn't there yet, don't even go for them and pass them on to the next car. Definitely plausible, but a pain in current formats.
Imagine an existing excellent bus network, like London's, but with completely dynamic routes, and a variety of bus sizes suitable for different times of day. Open the app and tell it where you're going, and it tells you which bus stop and bus number you need.
Not quite. Buses have fixed static routes. I described dynamic routes optimized to minimize delays for all users, while being picked up and dropped off at the exact address they want to be at, rather than some static bus stop.
> If we're imagining a pleasant future where self-driving cars have solved congestion, isn't some kind of car pooling going to be necessary
Maybe, maybe not. Small one-person "pod" cars that link up into road trains automatically are also a possibility, and have basically the same benefit for congestion as sharing without actually sharing the same pod.
That could work, but I'd bet against it! In the medium term at least.
It would be a big R&D problem to make it work at all. Even if it worked, is a train like that really going to be as efficient as a bus? And finally, even if those obstacles are overcome, it seems like everyone has to buy the same model (or at least compatible models, and who's going to make that happen?) to get decent economies of scale.
On the other hand -- in-flight refueling is a kind of similar problem that sounds similarly unlikely, but actually works!
On the other other hand, that's a very specialized (and I'm guessing very expensive) system that isn't used by commercial airlines. I think pod-trains will go roughly the same way.
