Wheel Comes Full Circle...But not Quite
Some time back, I had described Uber’s working (It’s a cab ride sharing company). In Silicon Valley, change is the only constant. And so, recently, Uber announced that if you were willing to walk a bit to the nearest Smart Routes location (shown on your Uber app, of course), they’d give a $1 discount on the fare. A bit before that, they’d announced that they would suggest nearby points from where your pickup would happen earlier than wherever you were currently located. A few months before that, Uber mentioned something they called “Perpetual Trip” that would “allow drivers to pick up and drop off passengers continuously along the way”. Join all these dots together, says Matt Buchanan, and a pattern begins to emerge : “If you put all of these Uber innovations together—pre-determined routes with fixed pickup points and continuous passenger pickups—it sounds remarkably like a gently optimized version of currently existing mass transit.” Ha ha! The wheel has come ci