 Cheick Cisse
09/13/2017
HW 1
Reflection about peer to peer ridesharing
      According to the Stanford report about One Hundred Year study on Artificial Intelligence (2016), the diversity and increase in the amount of data in the transportation sector are the major contributors to various transportation breakthrough such as peer to peer ridesharing. Although I agree that the availability of data for self-driving cars, route calculations and real-time sensing of traffic is inevitable, peer-to-peer ridesharing could have been developed without the availability of the data. 
      Indeed, peer-to-peer ridesharing, a process that connects people seeking rides and drivers willing to give rides, has been around for a while. For instance, in Mali, in West Africa, while many people could not afford to have a taxi license, they would give away flyers to inform people of their service. Most of these people created their own peer-to-peer ridesharing platform without any prior available transportation data. 
      Moreover, Hahn and Metcalfe (2017) argue that ridesharing has been around for a while. The authors explain that during World War 2, to save on rubber, the U.S. established ridesharing in workplaces. Furthermore, Hahn and Metcalfe claim that during the 1970s, when the price of gasoline was high, ridesharing was very popular. It can be inferred that ridesharing over the years was getting slowly popular. 
      Furthermore, if one were to create a peer to peer application without implementing the GPS or any transportation data, that person will be able to do so. Indeed, that person could create a platform where first, users (people seeking rides) and drivers enter their location upon registering. Secondly, when a user is seeking a ride, she or he could send a request with his location and destination through the app. Then, the app would send a notification to drivers that are registered in the same city. Next, the first driver to respond would be the one selected to give the ride. Even though such application may not be the most efficient one, one could argue that it is still a peer to peer ridesharing application that could be considered.
      However, even if peer-to-peer ridesharing could have been slowly developed without the availability of data, the use of data was an important accelerator of the process. Indeed, Hahn and Metcalfe argue that the development of the electronic payments and GPS, which was developed by the availability of data, accelerated the revolution of ridesharing. 
      To conclude, although the availability of data was an important contributor to the revolution of peer to peer ridesharing, it can be believed that even without the presence of useful data, peer to peer ridesharing, which is not new, would have still been able to develop at a slower rate. 

Hahn, R., & Metcalfe, R. (2017, January 10). The Ridesharing Revolution: Economic Survey and 
Synthesis. Retrieved from https://www.brookings.edu/wpcontent/uploads/2017/01/ridesharing-oup-1117-v6-brookings1.pdf
