So this week both Uber and Lyft decided, within about 24 hours of each other, that the thing San Francisco really needed was for strangers to share rides with strangers. Uber rolled out uberPOOL on Tuesday. Lyft answered back with Lyft Line on Wednesday. Same city, same idea, practically the same week: you get matched with someone else headed roughly your direction, you both pay less, and the driver picks up a second (or third) fare along the same route instead of circling back for a new one.
I don't live in SF, I just go up for conferences a couple times a year, so I can't actually try either of these yet since both are launching SF-only for now. But I've been reading the writeups all morning and I have opinions, because of course I do.
First: this is obviously the smart move for both companies, and it's obviously going to spread past SF fast. Regular UberX and Lyft are already undercutting cabs on price. A pooled ride undercuts that. If you're two people who happen to be going the same general direction at the same general time, splitting a car instead of hailing two separate ones is just math. Cheaper for the rider, more fares per hour for the driver, fewer empty seats on the road. I don't think there's a version of this that doesn't win eventually, assuming the matching algorithm doesn't route you six blocks out of your way to grab somebody else first (which, from what I've read about early testers, it sometimes does, one guy said his supposedly-faster pooled ride took ten minutes longer than a solo one would've).
Second, and this is the part that's more of a gut reaction than an analysis: I don't love getting into a car with a stranger who isn't the driver. That's a weirdly specific thing to be picky about, I know. I'm fine with cabs, I'm fine with a solo Uber, I'm fine on a crowded train with forty people I'll never speak to. But something about being wedged into the back seat of a Camry with one specific other human, both of us pretending to look at our phones while the driver makes small talk with just one of us, sounds exhausting in a way none of those other situations are. Maybe I'm the outlier here. Maybe everyone else is thrilled to save four bucks and doesn't care. I just know that when I picture actually doing it, my first instinct is to open the app, see the pooled option, and tap the more expensive one anyway.
The pricing gap is the real story though, not my social anxiety. Both companies are pitching this as meaningfully cheaper than the regular ride, not a token discount, and that's the number that's going to decide whether normal people actually use it or whether it stays a novelty a few early adopters try once and never touch again. A five or ten percent discount doesn't change anyone's habits. A discount big enough to make you think twice before driving yourself, that changes habits. We'll see which one this turns out to be once actual riders start posting about what they got charged.
What I keep coming back to is how fast these two just copy each other now. It used to feel like Uber does something, and a few months later Lyft has a version of it, or the other way around. Now it's a day. One announces a feature and the other has a nearly identical one live less than 24 hours later, which either means they both had it in the pipeline independently and the timing is a coincidence, or somebody's watching the other's beta testers a little too closely. Either way, if you're a rider in San Francisco this fall, you're going to end up with two nearly identical products fighting over your five dollars in savings, and that's a pretty good place to be sitting if you're the one deciding which app to open.
Anyway. I got surge-priced 2.9x trying to get away from AT&T Park after a Giants game a few months back and it ran me something like thirty-eight bucks for what should've been a twelve dollar ride, so any feature that makes the math slightly less brutal has my attention even if the social part of it makes me want to just walk instead.