At some point I was searching for an open source car pooling service. I realized there weren’t any so I started developing one on my free weekends.

While I haven’t made much progress so far, I have been observing how much as a society we have been relying on route planning software. Also, I cannot overlook the effect of such services on the planet (see Amazon, Uber, and many more).

With all this as a context, I have been asking myself the following questions:

  1. What would be the impact on society (especially inequality) if there were open source alternatives to such services?
  2. What would a common core look like? (i.e. what is the WordPress equivalent for transportation/route planning, is OpenStreetMaps enough?)
  3. What domain specific knowledge would it require to build such a software? (while in university I researched about the travelling salesman problem, anything else?)
  4. What safety protocols would we need to develop when there is no corporation insuring users? (i.e. if I order something from Amazon and it’s dead on arrival, I get either a refund or a replacement shipped to me for free)
  5. What’s the proper terminology to describe what I am describing?

Feel free to add any questions of your own. I created this post because I am free this afternoon and I wondered what it would like to discuss this with strangers instead of pondering on my own.

Edit: My free afternoon was taken away by an incident I had to respond to, it’s now late o’clock here, but I will do my best to reply to all you magnificent people.

  • souperk@reddthat.comOPEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Do you have any other taxi related experience or knowledge you would like to share? You seem quite knowledgeable.

    Also, do you think local taxi groups/companies/coops could benefit by hosting their own instance in a federated Uber like platform?

    Actual ride sharing, like, independent people using things like bulletin boards to both get to work together at a mutual benefit, is a fantastic practice. But when you try to make it some big service you basically get a half assed replacement for taxis that shift the financial burden onto drivers and cut prices as a result.

    That was the reason I started looking for a ride-sharing service in the first place. I was in Larissa, the morning after the Tempi train crash occurred. I was about to ride to Athens with my car and I realized that the only train track of the country was going to be out of order for months (still is). So, I decided to offer my seats for free to anyone interested, I made a post on a fb group about ride-sharing, but by the time someone reached out I had already left.

    That’s when I realized that user experience matters, that person was actively looking for a ride when I posted, but they missed my post. So, e-mail notifications was the 2nd feature I developed.