Developing a mobility marketplace enabled by cars and mobile phones.
I want to first express my thanks to several folks. I’m grateful to Oliver Zahn for suggesting I present the carpool project to BIDS back in April, at one of its weekly teas. Since then, Thomas Kluyver, Matthias Bussonnier, and Katy Huff have given me their reactions and good suggestions, which have helped me to take this further. There's a lot at stake.
Just imagine being able to go anywhere anytime for $0.25 per mile, and not have to park. This is 1/10th the cost of a taxi, 1/4th the cost of owning a car, and is less than public transportation. As such, if carpooling becomes culturally significant, it will not only dramatically reduce the cost of our mobility, but increase mobility itself, and do so in a safe and sustainable manner. Success therefore also promises to reduce inequality in America and be a force multiplier on our economic growth.
Given the importance we all have placed on sustainability for many years now, it's hard to fathom how we got to where we are today. Our daily movements are more costly and congested than ever before, not to mention more damaging to the future of our planet. Because the very nature of the sharing economy is both erratic and frenetic, it has not alleviated but contributed to the problem. And among the culprits, I include the ride-sharing sector as we know it today. So this is a big challenge. But I’m confident that capitalism and humanity can conspire to solve the problem, and relatively quickly at that.
My exposure to BIDS led to my meeting Dav Clark and Anthony Suen of the BIDS collaborative, to my auditing Dav’s Hacking Measurement class at the I-School, and to our data project. I'm grateful for their interest and valuable support.
The carpool project is now a year old. It has already involved a lot of math, testing existing ridesharing services, and prototyping, all for the purpose of translating a conception of our mobility into a business model, a mobile product, and now a go-to-market strategy. The data project below is at the heart of our GTM strategy. As such, it's an important part of the carpool project, a soon-to-be-launched venture in which the profits will be performance-based and democratically-shared.
Vivek Hutheesing: http://vivekhutheesing.com/ or vivek-at-rBlock-dot-com