This proof-of-concept illustrates how the web could facilitate ridesharing without companies in the middle
Uber is just a payment system that privately shows people with cars the location of people without cars. Uber makes money by scraping off some of what those people without cars pay for rides. In a lot of ways, making a lot of noise and educating the public about private rideshare services has been the biggest value the company has added.
But it makes you wonder: why couldn’t hackers put together an open, free app that did the same thing? Or at least did enough of it that people could work around the big hailing companies.
Siberian-born programmer Roman Pushkin has built a Telegram bot that lets people with cars and people without them connect anywhere in the world, with a much lighter, more private connection. It’s called LibreTaxi. It’s live now—with open source code on Github—and could theoretically work anywhere.
Pushkin tells the story of the newish app in more detail in a Medium post he published earlier this month. Whenever he’d go home to Siberia, he would think about how greater connections could help. In particular, when his relatives learned about Uber and Lyft, they said that would be a nice solution for people in remote locations. They didn’t have it, though, and Pushkin guessed that remote locations all over the world might feel the same.
Telegram is a messaging app. It has especially strong penetration with Russian users. Creating a way for people with cars to connect with people who need rides in remote areas was just an idea until Telegram enabled bots. By building on top of the chat app, Pushkin didn’t have to build his own chat interface and was able to take advantage of all the phone features that Telegram already connects with, such as GPS.
