I hope they get something similar to the Driver's Cooperative, which is like Uber/Lyft but owned but the drivers themselves. Right now though my understanding is they're only in NYC/Denver.

Sure, I will believe Uber and Lyft are going to leave when they actually do.

See the thing is, as titanic as these “rideshare” companies are they don’t fucking do anything but maintain a shitty app and provide some kind of legal stability.

All it takes is for one functional socialist worker cooperative to get a basic ass rideshare app off the ground and if it starts to build serious momentum even in an American city or two all of a sudden the billions and billions of dollars that rideshare companies claim they are worth starts to turn invisible like one of those parts to a time travel movie where a character has begun to turn transparent and disappear because they have been erased from the timeline.

The vast majority of the time these companies aren’t going to want to take that risk, or if they do they are idiots for doing so.

We don’t need software companies like this the way we need electronics companies, grocery stores, power companies and other modern conveniences that take massive, physical organizations of material.

Sure software isn’t trivial to do, having that amount of servers isn’t trivial to do but how much do you REALLY need a year to fund development, hosting and maintenance of a rideshare app owned by a worker collective or open sourced? 5 million a year? That barely buys the CEO of Ubers office furnishings I bet.

It'll be tough finding someone who can build a phone app that consumes both the Square API and the Google Maps API. /s

Minneapolis may have to settle for only 11 separate college students filling the gap out of their dorm rooms.

I'm an organizer, I'd gladly help gig drivers form a worker cooperative

I hope they don't let the door hit them on the way out... we don't want ass prints on the door.

Well In that case someone call up the IWW. Let's fire up some computers.

I don't know if taxi companies have upped their online game, but Uber and Lyft's huge advantage used to be that the customer could see what the ride would cost them, when their ride would arrive, and pay online. Those of us old enough can remember days when you'd worry about whether a taxi driver was going to take the scenic route, whether you'd have enough cash, whether they'd accept a credit card, whether they'd add some surcharge to credit card transactions, and then having to trust your credit card to yet another random stranger. Having to use taxis used to be a reliable source of stress when traveling; Uber utterly removed that (if you were male; I know women have additional sources of angst when getting into cars with strangers).

If Taxi companies have gotten their online shit together, where I can see the entire transaction - times and costs - in advance, then yeah, I'll agree with you. But originally, Uber and Lyft were huge game changers for customers.

They shouldn't even exist in the space since they skirted regulators when setting up. It's like if the pirate bay set themselves up as a legitimate business.

That's assuming the cars always have a fare on board - one truth of running a taxi is that there's a lot of downtime when you don't have a customer.