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Comment by bogomipz | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised at the reactions. Are parents really that cavalier about putting their kids in some random person's car and entrusting them to some random person's driving habits?

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What, you mean like a bus driver?

Also, "Shuddle’s main pitch point was their focus on safety: They did intense background checks on drivers, monitored drivers to ensure they stayed on route and didn’t speed or text while driving and offered real-time ride tracking to parents."

Turns out to be a school bus driver takes a little bit of work: http://www.wikihow.com/Get-a-School-Bus-Driver's-License

Indeed, and so does being a Shuddle driver. It's not (wasn't) the equivalent of trusting your kid to some random cabbie.

You are technically misusing the word random, and that is the crux of the matter.

I hate the pedantry that surrounds the word random. Language is defined by those who use it, and clearly by a random person he meant "someone that the parent do not know"

Which is a real concern, and probably is contributing to the downfall of this company, because their market consists entirely of well-off, but also really apathetic parents, which is a niche market if I have ever seen one.

Yeah, it's like babysitting, but with better background checks and oversight.

This is true. And to go a bit further I was attempting to build a Shuddle like service a bit over a year ago, and many of our early interested families actually requested that the driver double as a sitter after driving them. Drive the child home from school at 3:30pm and stay with them until 5:30pm when the parent gets home. I do still believe there is a niche here that's not simply an Uber "feature".

When I was a little kid, I walked or rode my bike. Everyone did. And back then, crime was multiple times higher than today.

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