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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

Except we never called that "ridesharing". It was just "carpooling".

As much as I hate the term ridesharing, since it doesn't actually describe what these companies and drivers do, it's not like it was a widely-used term that's been redefined over the past decade.

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I believe it was called carpooling and ride sharing both, depending partly on where in the world you were. That’s a pedantic point anyhows; clearly ridesharing does not describe a taxi service like UberX.

When you "share a ride" you go to the same place or in the same general way?

Unless the Uber takes more than one passanger it's not any ride sharing involved. Maybe the could call it vehicle sharing ...

If the rest of us continue to incorrectly call Uber etc. "ridesharing" then that definition will soon become set in stone. Can we not just call them exactly what they are? Which is taxis. By every definition, they are taxis.

I'm pretty sure that ship has already sailed.

To me, the distinction comes down to: carpooling implies some kind of repeated/scheduled vehicle sharing (like coworkers coordinating a route to get to work at 9a every weekday, while ridesharing is much more ad-hoc/on-demand (like craigslist rideshares between Seattle and Portland to split the gas bill).

Definitely agree that Lyft/Uber aren’t really ride sharing in that sense though — the driver’s goal is to earn a fare on a trip he wasn’t going to take otherwise, while the original ride shares were a cost-reduction on a trip the driver was going to make anyway.

> carpooling implies some kind of repeated/scheduled vehicle sharing

In the Bay Area there's something called Casual Carpool; essentially it's just a series of locations you can go to around work-travel hours, and people who have cars and are willing to pick up people going to the same area will randomly show up and pick people up. No scheduling or prior arrangements aside from the locations. (And it's been around way longer than Uber/Lyft/etc.)

Ridesharing is when a group of people rent a van through a ridesharing program and one of those people drives it. The driver is kind of like a school bus driver.

Carpooling is when 2+ drivers ride together in a car one of them owns instead of everyone driving separately.

I've never heard of your ridesharing example before. When people do that I still hear it called carpooling, just perhaps, "we rent a van and carpool".

It's called vanpooling, often, obviously.

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