I think this lunch may have been eaten – Via now has a contract to do routing and location reporting for the NYC school bus system.

> They should open source their platform and provide a variety of online services and also support on running the platform internally, then offer it to the global market of taxi companies, delivery providers and enterprise level car fleets.

While I would appreciate Lyft being a company like that, I suspect that most people won't care whether the taxi-companies use open platforms; and taxi companies would have no incentives to use Lyft's platform when the taxi companies already have their own network.