Slashdot Asks: Your Favorite Ride-Sharing App?

There are many ride-sharing applications on the market but only two get all the media attention: Uber and Lyft. As many of you know, Uber has had a tumultuous year marked by a high-stakes legal fight with Alphabet over Google self-driving car trade secrets, a investigation by the U.S. government into the company's use of a software tool that helped its drivers avoid detection in parts of the country where the service wasn't allowed to operate in, and a sexual harassment investigation that resulted in 20 employees being fired. Uber's CEO Travis Kalanick resigned due to many of these scandals and investor pressure. Despite all of this, Uber continues to do well. Last week, the company announced it hit 5 billion rides across 6 continents, 76 countries, and 450+ cities.

Meanwhile, Lyft, which is only available in the U.S., just announced it hit one million rides a day. The company also says it's seen 48 consecutive months of ride growth and is on track to hit an annualized ride rate of 350 million. Our question to you is this: what ride-sharing app is your favorite? Have you found yourself gravitating more towards Lyft due to Uber's messes, or does that not matter much to you? Bonus: do you have a favorite ride-sharing app that's not Lyft or Uber?

Comments

Game changer, but only in some locales.

[RockyMountain]

Ok, I'll get my nitpick out of the way first: I've always hated the mis-application of the term "Ride Sharing" to Uber and Lyft. They have nothing to do with Ride Sharing. More like taxis, but I don't totally buy that equivalency either. Here's why.

For people who live in a "taxi city" like New York or Chicago or London, there really is very little difference between Uber, Lyft, a classic taxi, or a minicab. These are cities where a significant fraction of the populace uses taxis much of the time already. Here Uber and Lyft are additional players in the taxi economy, but they don't change the game one iota. I won't get into the politics of whether they are good or bad in these locales. That's not my soapbox.

But what about other locations? Smaller towns, or cities that were never traditionally taxi-centric -- where most folks own private cars and use them most of the time. Or in outer-lying suburbs of big cities that are poorly served by taxis. If you live in or frequently travel to such an area, you'll understand that Uber and Lyft really *have* changed the game -- by being truly distributed rather than depot-centric, and much more adaptive to demand. Call a convectional taxi, and the dispatch office will tell you it'll be 20 minutes. Call again an hour later, and the dispatch office will tell you 20 more minutes. Repeat another hour later, and once again the answer will be 20 more minutes. There's no way to ever know whether and when you'll get your ride. If and when the taxi ever shows up, the driver very likely doesn't know how to get to your destination, and speaks very little language in common with you, and besides by then you probably no longer want to go!

Uber and Lyft have fixed that (but not everywhere). There is now a relatively reliable service, that you can call at pretty much any time, and the estimated arrival times really are reliable, and usually pretty short, and if there will be a long wait, you know about it and can plan accordingly. And when there truly is nobody available, you know it -- you don't get strung along.

Even the dreaded surge pricing has not been a problem for me (so far). I've almost never had to pay it, and the few times I have haven't affected my long-term average cost much. I have occasionally gamed it, switching to Lyft when Uber is surged, and vice versa. Very surprisingly, that worked!

So, YMMV, but for me Uber and Lyft have indeed changed the game. For me, they've made me much less dependent upon rental cars when I travel, and have made other forms of public transit more viable too, by solving the "last mile problem".

I'd like to see more players in the game, though.