Potential Scenario: What if you could simply push a button on your smart phone to notify a cab of your current location and get an on-demand pick-up within minutes (or seconds if you are in a large city)? That would be a great feature for anyone, particularly people with visual disabilities or other impairments that make hailing a taxi difficult (citation: Paul Parravano). Going one step further, why shouldn’t anyone be able to pick you up and take you someplace for a few bucks? Just like sleeping on a stranger’s couch, hitchhiking is something that is dangerous in theory but may be feasible with the proper technology and protocols.
Solution: (First note complete disregard the enormous government regulation of the taxicab industry as we present this utopian transportation scenario.) Anyone with a car less than five years old and of a certain make/model can apply for “gypsy cab” status. Approval is based on the applicant’s driving and insurance record. Once approved, the driver is sent a kit, including a GPS device, web camera, and LED light. If a driver is open to pick up a fair, he/she can turn on the device to find available passengers and notify the world (with a green LED in the windshield) that any pedestrian is free to hail. As soon as a passenger is picked up, the driver enters the destination in the GPS, the LED changes from green to red, and the fair begins as they proceed on the directed route. In order to maintain safety, the web cam will turn on during the fair and broadcast the interior of the car to the web, allowing a community of netizens to ensure the safety of these cabs just like citizens do for the streets of London, England.
In short, the internet can help to solve the transportation problems of our society. With the right changes and proper technology, we can crowdsource transportation and make moving people a peer-to-peer process as efficient as moving packets of information around the interweb.
Citation: Andrew Magliozzi & Nathaniel Levy
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