I remember seeing this app a couple months ago and being excited about a team finally doing this. They’ve been available in New York City for a while and now they’re trying to raise money to expand to more places. Hopefully they open source the app\server in the future since it would be great to have more co-op apps for the other “gig economy” style apps.
As a customer I’d rather use a platform that is not owned by drivers.
How come?
Because in any dispute between a driver and a customer, drivers will protect drivers.
Right, I see what you mean, so there’d be a power imbalance there. From my perspective, if drivers buddy-buddied with each other to that degree, customers would just flock back to Uber and the business would tank pretty fast. It would be more beneficial for the drivers to treat their customers well.
Do you care more about the credibility of a business that you do have an ownership stake in or one you don’t have an ownership stake in?
The drivers have a collective interest in maintaining the credibility of their app regardless of how the ownership is structured. There will be a similar management structure to ensure customer satisfaction regardless of ownership structure.
Moreover if you’re an individual driver with an ownership stake you have a greater interest in maintaining the credibility of your business vs a business that some one else owns.
So in theory there should be slightly greater incentive to provide good service under this structure.
Two lines from two disparate forms of art spring to mind when reading this headline :
“they’ll be fighting in the streets with our children at our feet, and the morals that they worshiped will be gone” ~ the who
"“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” ~ george orwell
