Uber Lame ⇥ buzzfeed.com

Johana Bhuiyan reports for Buzzfeed:

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick often talks about his dream of the perfect Uber trip. “It’s the perpetual trip, the trip that never ends,” he said at the Digital-Life-Design conference in Europe last October. “The driver picks one passenger up, picks another passenger up, drops off the first passenger, but then picks up passenger number three and drops off passenger number two.”

What would be even better is if the driver could use a really big car to hold more than a handful of people. That kind of scale could allow Kalanick to set a flat rate so it becomes affordable to lower income passengers, who perhaps need to live outside of the city centre and use it for their work commute. And perhaps this would become such a valuable piece of infrastructure that he could sell it to municipalities who could then subsidize the cost to users through taxes.

What I’m getting at is that Kalanick’s perfect Uber is a bus.

Update: Via Ben Sargent, the songthaew is fairly similar as well:

Songthaews are used both within towns and cities and for longer routes between towns and villages. Those within towns are converted from pick-up trucks and usually travel fixed routes for a set fare, but in some cases (as in Chiang Mai) they are used as shared taxis for passengers traveling in roughly the same direction.