
Lyft adds a new app for drivers - wyndham
http://www.businessinsider.com/lyft-adds-scheduled-rides-new-app-for-drivers-2017-5
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jswny
I think this is a very good idea! I know many people around where I live who
use local Uber drivers whom they trust to schedule early-morning rides to the
airport and things like that. The rider will have the driver come to his/her
house at the specified time, and then the driver and the rider will both turn
on Uber and the rider's request will be filled by that driver because nobody
else is nearby that early. This would would make it much easier to do
something like that for both the rider and the driver, and I see this as an
important use case because it's really the only remaining one which many
people would prefer to use a car service or taxi service than Uber/Lyft. It's
also much more profitable for the driver so drivers will like this a lot.
Great move on Lyft's part, maybe they could consider allowing riders to
directly send requests to certain drivers. The point here being that riders
using Lyft like a car service have drivers they trust to come on time, not
cancel, etc. which are the only potential problems I see here.

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kcanini
If they're going to the trouble of pre-arranging the ride, why don't they just
use cash/Venmo/Square, and keep Uber's cut of the fare?

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SilasX
Assuming you mean, other than the ethical concerns?

A) Who's insuring the ride? If it's not insured and the driver is at fault in
a collision, there could be no one to pay for injuries to you -- Lyft/Uber
certainly wouldn't owe anything for stuff booked outside their platform.

Usually when they drive for a TNC, the TNC provides the insurance for the
driver in the course of using the app. It's really unlikely for the driver to
have a policy that covers them for non-TNC freelance rides -- especially since
the big insurers haven't caught up to the realities of this use case and
seriously overprice them.

(AIUI, they just have policies that assume you drive full time commercially,
nothing that works on a per mile basis -- and even if they do have such
policies, that would defeat most of the purpose of cutting out middlemen, as
there would now be a written record of the transaction that can't be hidden on
taxes.)

B) In order to get enough information to re-book out-of-band you'd have to
accept it and then cancel. Do that a lot and it will be grounds for being
kicked off the platform.

(The same applies to the people in the anecdotes in the sibling comments.)

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sanderjd
Out of curiosity, what are the ethical concerns? The arrangement is not being
made by the middleman company. I don't see how it is unethical to not pay them
for something they did not do.

Point (B) doesn't make sense to me. Why do you have to accept and then cancel?
You just get the driver's phone number and talk to them directly.

In fact, if this is _not_ common already, I think it undermines the contention
of these companies that they are merely a service being provided to
independent contractors. If drivers are independent contractors, _of course_
they should be trying to build their own brand and dedicated clientele.

Point (A) is a good one, though. Sounds like there should be independent
insurance providers that these independent contractors can use.

If you're instead saying that drivers are _employees_ of these companies, then
maybe you're right about all the rest of it. But you can't have it both ways!

~~~
SilasX
>Out of curiosity, what are the ethical concerns? The arrangement is not being
made by the middleman company. I don't see how it is unethical to not pay them
for something they did not do.

Their service was connecting drivers and riders -- allowing them to find each
other for the transaction. They connected you. That was their service. (They
provide other related intermediary services, but the "finding" function is the
big one.)

Same issue as when a recruiter finds leads and the employer makes an offer to
the employee directly and cuts out the recruiter, which is why they set up a
bunch of contractual barriers to stop it.

EDIT: Sorry, I misunderstood the use case -- that wouldn't apply to future
bookings _after_ the first one's been completed and they've exchanged
information. But the "moat" there is the difficulty of iterating through your
network of past uber drivers for each future ride.

>Point (B) doesn't make sense to me. Why do you have to accept and then
cancel? You just get the driver's phone number and talk to them directly.

AFAIK, they don't give you any way to contacting each other until the ride is
accepted. Am I mistaken here?

>If you're instead saying that drivers are employees of these companies, then
maybe you're right about all the rest of it. But you can't have it both ways!

No. You can have a legitimate claim to compensation for connecting two people
without the seller thereby being your employee -- see the recruiting example
(though it's a bit confusing in that there is another employment relationship
in the picture but I'm sure you see the mapping -- a recruiter can
legitimately claim that they're owed a cut while not saying that their the
employer of the, er, hiring manage or the candidate).

EDIT: As above, that wouldn't apply to future rides or job offers after that
contract.

~~~
toomuchtodo
There is no moral or ethical obligation to compensate Lyft or Uber for future
rides not on their platform.

Also, it seems anyone could replicate this feature by using Stripe Connect.
It's cool, but expect rapid commoditization of preplanned ride coordination.

Edit: comment recinded due to OPs edit.

~~~
SilasX
>There is no moral or ethical obligation to compensate Lyft or Uber for future
rides not on their platform.

Sorry, you're right, I misunderstood -- see the edit.

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Kiro
So this is of course anecdotal but the only time I book taxis is when it's
very important I get somewhere in time, like catching a plane early in the
morning. Given the nature of Uber/Lyft it would take a lot before I would
trust them with this.

~~~
arthens
Are taxis more reliable than lift/uber where you live? My experience in
Australia is the opposite.

I never had a uber (no lift here) not showing up , while booking a taxi is
almost like a lottery. Few years back our office manager booked 4 cabs for 6pm
of the following day because we had a work function to go to. The first cab
showed up at 6.50 after countless calls to the taxi company, the other never
did.

We ended up calling 3 uber and we were on our way within 10 minutes.

That was the day I swore to never get on a taxi again, unless I really really
had to.

~~~
kcanini
I've had bad experiences like this with both taxis and Ubers. With Uber, I've
had dozens of experiences where either (1) There were no drivers available in
my area, (2) The drivers repeatedly canceled on me, or (3) The driver didn't
cancel, but also never came to pick me up, and instead just drove in the
opposite direction for 10-15 minutes.

I now don't trust taxis, Uber, or Lyft to get me to the airport very early in
the morning. I live in DC, not exactly a small town.

~~~
nilkn
This is why I still use an old-school limo company ("limo" as in fancy black
car, not a real limousine) for airport pickups/dropoffs in my home city. Years
ago I found one that's extremely reliable and trustworthy. Nearly five years
later I haven't had a single issue.

Uber in general is much better than taxis, but I still wouldn't really trust
it for time-critical early morning pickups.

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pfarnsworth
I don't think scheduling a ride a few days in advance actually helps the
drivers. One of the best things about Uber or Lyft for the drivers is that
they don't have to think about scheduling, they're told exactly where to
drive.

If they have a scheduled ride and they forget about it, or they're stuck
waiting around to make that ride and lose business, that doesn't seem like it
will be popular.

One big thing that Uber needs to fix is the incentive scheme. One of the Uber
drivers I talked to said she hated how they were, in my words, gamified into
earning their incentive bonuses. And the incentive bonuses change every time,
so it makes it hard for them to keep track. That's something Uber needs to
change in order to increase driver satisfaction, making it clearer and more
consistent on how to earn the incentives which is where the drivers make more.
I don't see how Lyft's "Power Zones" are any different from Uber showing where
surge is occurring, but if it works, then great.

~~~
jpalomaki
This could be something for Lyft drivers people who don't drive so regularly.
You could for example spot gigs which you can handle while riding to work. If
you know day or two beforehand, you can then adjust your schedule accordingly.

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bpicolo
This could be a really good thing if you're an hour away from the airport
where you have a morning flight, but a really bad thing if the driver decides
that morning to not take you. :)

~~~
aptwebapps
Presumably another driver would pick it up - it wouldn't just get dropped.

~~~
Paul-ish
That would require there to be another driver, which in a less populous area
at 4AM might not be the case. It seems like there would need to be steep
penalties on both parties if they cancel near the arranged time.

Eg: Driver cancels 2 hours before pickup. Lyft penalizes driver x% of total
fee, then uses that to "bid up" the price on that pickup to entice another
driver to fulfill the request at the last minute. This has the potential to
help attract drivers to go out of their way, which could help in less urban
areas.

~~~
BurningFrog
I assume/hope the driver app has reminders and confirmations before the ride.

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dnautics
With the caveat that I don't work for Lyft DevOps or anything (I only used to
be a driver way back when)... If you need to make a critical update to the
driver side your code is solidly firewalled from having to pass integration
tests with the passenger side, and there's a possibility that some problems
bleed through between the two different parts of the app. In the early days,
there were a few updates where such things leaked through (if I remember
correctly, there was one version update where the passengers accidentally
could see the primetime map).

Quite frankly, I'm suprised they hadn't done it sooner.

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yiggydyang
Grrrr... BI no longer works when you have an ad blocker installed.

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_rpd
It works with uBlock Origin with "Anti-Adblock Killer | Reek​​" checked under
"3rd-party filters"

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yiggydyang
Suite! Thanks

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sverige
As a rider, I haven't noticed the Lyft app to be slow or especially bloated,
so it will be interesting to see if it is significantly faster once the update
pushes through with the driver portion removed.

~~~
dfinninger
I doubt it. If you aren't a driver I think it would be senseless to be running
driver code at the same time as rider code. Maybe a little less disk (flash?),
but I'm not certain. I'm neither a mobile dev or a Lyft employee.

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dave84
Interesting, there's obviously a demand for this feature but I wonder if it
will change the way the end user books rides substantially or if its just a
nice to have.

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cjiang
Chinese Didi had it long ago...

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joelrunyon
Anyone got a non-BI link?

~~~
jnpatel
Here are the direct Lyft pages on the two new driver features mentioned in the
article: Scheduled Rides [0] and Power Zones [1].

[0]: [https://blog.lyft.com/posts/introducing-scheduled-
rides](https://blog.lyft.com/posts/introducing-scheduled-rides)

[1]: [https://thehub.lyft.com/power-zones/](https://thehub.lyft.com/power-
zones/)

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inverse_pi
Everyone loves the underdog

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throwaway3589
Why is this front page worthy?

Uber has had these features for a while now. As someone else mentioned, Didi
has had these features too. 71 upvotes so far. This just further reinforces my
view that there is an active voting ring on HN manipulating Uber and Lyft
stories in Lyft's favor, which is ironic since many of the comments on such
stories talk about Uber being shady.

Throwaway because I fully expect the voting ring people to downvote this.

Downvoters and those who upvoted this story, please leave a comment explaining
why this is front page worthy.

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pavel_lishin
> _Downvoters and those who upvoted this story, please leave a comment
> explaining why this is front page worthy._

We don't owe you an explanation, but I'll offer one anyway: I upvoted because
it's a story about a popular tech company, and the way they're trying to
improve their offering for their semi-employees. Why wouldn't I upvote this?

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e-sushi
Let's see how that goes...

