Can we stop with the "rideshare" junk yet? Uber and Lyft are computer-dispatched taxi services. The overwhelming majority of their trips involve the driver going to someplace they have no need of going, with either zero or one other person in the car.
I have no idea what you are really trying to say. How do you define need? All my Lyft trips have either been to/from an auto mechanic or the airport. Is that "need"? In principle, I could have gotten friends to drive me, given enough incentive. Or I could have parked at the airport, or ridden the bus, or gone to a mechanic that made it convenient to wait for work to be done.
Gp is trying to say that nobody is really "sharing a ride" that they would be driving anyway, as in hitchhiking with compensation. It's virtually all professional drivers going where the client goes exclusively because the client goes there. Hence the term "ridesharing" is misleading. A very successful piece of clever viral marketing, or maybe a fossil of an early strategy.
It's a semantic point, but a valid one. Words matter.
We don’t call them taxis in California because in most California cities they’re different because of:
* no access to red lanes
* only app-based payment
* unique pickup/dropoff locations at airports and other such places
If we called them computer-dispatched taxi we’d confuse that with Flywheel-style stuff which can use red lanes, take cash, and use taxi locations. We could call them Taxi Type 2 but that’s super confusing.
“TNCs” is just an awful name so we use something that sounds intuitive “ridesharing”, since we know that pooling is possible on these services. It’s just a name. No one has proposed an alternative simple enough.
In Transport for London terminology they are called "Private Hire" companies. Separately regulated, you can't flag them down on the street, and no access to taxi lanes.
My impression is that by "the driver going to someplace they have no need of going", they meant "drivers going where the client goes exclusively because the client goes there", contrasting with the hitchhiking-like scenario implied by the word "ridesharing". Possibly, you interpreted that as questioning the client's real need of going?
> The overwhelming majority of their trips involve the driver going to someplace they have no need of going, with either zero or one other person in the car.
Can you cite a source? At least where I am (Seattle) Uber Pool and Express are quite popular - and I rarely see hard numbers.
