How one man’s mission to help his hometown became an app with thousands of users
Every day, millions of people around the world in megacities like New York, São Paulo, Kolkata, Tokyo, and Dhaka click on a bit-and-atom logo on their smartphones to hail a ride by Uber. Even citizens of smaller municipalities like Nizhny Novgorod, Russia or Milan, Italy can access Uber, or its largest competitor Lyft, at a moment’s notice. In fact, we urbanites have grown so dependent on Uber and Lyft that when these services aren’t available, chaos ensues.
But what about the 46% of us who don’t live in cities? That’s over 3 billion people globally who can’t and likely will not be able to access Uber for the foreseeable future, not to mention all those who live in urban, non-major population centers lacking the service.
This is exactly the problem that Roman Pushkin, Russian-born Silicon Valley software engineer, set out to solve when he built LibreTaxi: an open-source, alternative ride-sharing service aimed at underserved, rural populations around the world. Not only does LibreTaxi charge no fees, it’s also compatible with almost any OS you can name, from Android and iOS on mobile to Linux, macOS, and Windows on the desktop. For Pushkin, compatibility with a variety of devices, and especially older devices with less-powerful hardware, was a must-have, given the target populations of LibreTaxi who might not have the newest Apple or Samsung devices. For instance, people in Siberia.
Three years ago, Pushkin was visiting his hometown in Siberia when he discovered that many of the residents had never heard of Uber. Many didn’t even know what ride-sharing was. That *** him thinking — how could he bring ride-sharing to populations that large corporations such as Uber and Lyft couldn’t or wouldn’t serve?
Pushkin has lived in a number of different places, so he could empathize and understand the struggles of rural populations when it comes to the lack of the latest technology in non-urban areas. Around the same time he moved to Moscow at the age of 7, he became interested in computers and started working on a ZX Spectrum. Five years later, he switched to IBM-compatible machines and described programming as the "main interest" of his life because "computers were something rare, and people were always talking about these rare, exciting things, and nobody knew how they worked. It was fun to write something to make computers work as you wanted." After earning his computer science degree and working in the software industry in Russia, he took up a series of freelance jobs and moved to India, then Germany, then Spain, back to Russia, and finally found himself in Silicon Valley a few years back. He’s also spent time in Thailand, Nepal, and all sorts of other interesting locales, so when he realized the demand for ride-sharing existed in Siberia, of course, he wanted to help.
"When you wake up every day, you know that you will help people today." -Roman Pushkin, founder of LibreTaxi
Launched in early 2017, LibreTaxi already has 20, 000–50, 000 users (Pushkin wouldn’t specify for privacy and security reasons) . It took some time for Pushkin to discover how to implement ride-sharing for rural communities efficiently, and he only started working on LibreTaxi about a year back as a side project — though he said he hopes to find a way to work on it full time in the future. According to Pushkin, he was looking at his phone one day when he received a mobile notification from secure-messaging app Telegram that a new API was available. That’s when a light bulb went off in his head, and today’s LibreTaxi is a bot based off Telegram. Calling a ride is as easy as messaging the bot — you can even call your driver through the app before pickup.
Unlike Uber and Lyft, LibreTaxi has been completely open-sourced on Github. A self-professed libertarian on a social mission, Pushkin said that he "released the source code with a very permissive license" because he doesn’t like corporate control. In fact, Pushkin encourages independent forks of LibreTaxi and encourages users to create their own LibreTaxi instances customized for their needs. For example, Pushkin says that one coder has "created a customized, on-demand application for Nigeria" and a small company with a hundred employees is now running their own instance to "optimize commute times for people [to carpool] using LibreTaxi."
"It is just not honest to cut earnings of people who work as taxi drivers." -Roman Pushkin, founder of LibreTaxi
In fact, LibreTaxi isn’t Pushkin’s first foray into social entrepreneurship: he recently created a free, online programming course in Ruby in Russian, whose alums have gone on to work at major firms such as Red Hat. He also currently works in the healthcare industry, which he characterizes as being very different from the rest of the tech sector. "If you work on applications, any kind of application…you try to sell things to people, try to sell more, " he said, "but when you work in healthcare it’s a little bit different. When you wake up every day, you know that you will help people today."
Pushkin’s mission to help underprivileged populations, in addition to LibreTaxi’s prioritization of privacy and security, is why LibreTaxi has a barebones user interface and no live-GPS tracking (though it does have GPS) . Pushkin described LibreTaxi as "self-sufficient…it is very minimal but it works very well." Since LibreTaxi is primarily targeted towards rural populations, not residents of places like New York, this approach makes sense. It’s even compatible with non-automobile taxis: LibreTaxi plays nice with boats, bikes, and any other mode of transportation. Pushkin was careful to stress that not only does the minimalistic design enable LibreTaxi to play nice with older devices, the app isn’t designed to replace large ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft but rather to expand access to technology and the sharing economy.
That’s also why the service is cash-only, and drivers set their own (ne***iable) prices, so Pushkin takes no cut of their earnings. Living in San Francisco, which has infamously sky-high costs of living, Pushkin has seen first-hand the costs of being an Uber driver. "It is just not honest to cut earnings of people who work as taxi drivers, " he said to me, "if you look at Uber, in San Francisco at least, they cut 30% of drivers’ earnings…in other cities, they cut 20–25%."
When asked about possible safety concerns of using LibreTaxi, Pushkin conceded that this could be a problem in large urban centers. He emphasized that LibreTaxi is designed for "very closed communities where people know each other." While he did say that it is gaining some traction in certain cities, Pushkin also noted that the app was probably safe in certain "safe countries, " using India as an example where "every car that you see on the streets is a professional taxi." Still, he does have plans to address passenger safety.
Pushkin is also understandably excited about the rise of blockchain technologies. Beyond his plans to allow payment by Bitcoin in LibreTaxi, Pushkin wants LibreTaxi to become "a real, free application." Because the app is hosted on Pushkin’s own server at the moment, he has the power to control LibreTaxi’s drivers and customers. Blockchain would cut him out of the equation the same way LibreTaxi cuts the corporation out of ride-sharing, allowing LibreTaxi to become truly decentralized. Not surprisingly, Pushkin would welcome the change: any step closer to a consumer-focused economy without a center is fine by him.
Note from the author: Roman wanted me to let you know that he is "always open to communication and collaboration. If anyone is interested, who has a community somewhere [that can use LibreTaxi] or has transportation problems, " let him know. You can find him on Twitter @romanpushkin, on Medium, or on Github.
Visit http://libretaxi.org/index-am.html website, click on the white "Install" button and download the "Telegram" messenger.
