Hello Fellow SmartCar Owners,
Make money from your smartcar! Charge people to give rides. I co-founded an internet company called Tickengo which is perfect for all SmartCar owners, who tend to be pioneers and ecologically-minded. Simply go to
www.tickengo.com and register your email address. Share the link will all your Facebook friends in order to share it as it is truly awesome. Below is an article I wrote which explains what we do in some detail.
The Impending Decline of Taxis
With the rise of collaborative consumption and the sharing economy, the future of taxi service appears bleak. In fact the future of transportation is about to be turned upside down. The notion of having to call a cab to get to the airport or a restaurant will soon disappear as public transportation becomes more efficient, less expensive and more human.
Thanks to Tickengo, travelers are able to easily connect with neighboring citizens who have a car and accept to give rides. There is no need to call a cab when a friend, a neighbor, or somebody in your local vicinity would be happy to drive you where you need to go. Your neighbors may already be going to the same place and would love the opportunity to earn a small fee to help reimburse their car-ownership costs (which on average are a whopping $8000 per year)! A cab may charge $40 for a ride to the airport while a neighbor would do it for $20.
With Tickengo anybody who needs a ride can simply go to Tickengo.com (via web or mobile app) and send a ride request for an immediate or scheduled pick-up. The person needing a ride specifies a drop-off point, a date/time and personal preferences (for example a woman may prefer to ride only with another woman). The ride request is immediately sent to drivers who have registered as volunteers on the site and who match the requested criteria. The first driver on the list of recipients who accepts the ride gets it and two parties instantly connect with each other. The passenger receives a ticket and his credit card is charged once at destination. Both parties provide an evaluation of the other, making the community a trustworthy place.
The Tickengo experience is social, local, and mobile! It’s a perfect example of what can happen when citizens work together to improve their lives.
In the end, an eventual disappearance of taxis would not be much cause for sadness. Taxis are part of a regulated and monopolistic system. The fact that taxis are purposely made scarce through a limitation on the number of licenses in each city enables prices to be kept high and customer service to take a back seat. The reason that there are anti-trust laws is to encourage competition and avoid monopolies. Taxi services are part a legal oligopoly that is fantastic for owners but horrible for consumers. In the taxi industry, a large percentage of telephone calls for service result in no-shows. When one calls a company to order a cab, the person answering the phone is often impolite, brusque and inarticulate. There is much room for improvement.
Thanks to the sharing economy and technology, the transportation industry is about to undergo a major redesign. Taxi service is on the way out and will gradually be replaced by collaborative citizenry.
Today
Linear Mode
