Ridesharing

Ridesharing refers to a direct exchange between a vehicle owner and a passenger whereby the owner transports the passenger using a private vehicle in exchange for money.^[1] This exchange differs from services offered by taxi companies, public transit, and other transportation providers by allowing consumers to directly provide transportation services to other consumers with limited interaction through an intermediary. Lyft and Uber hire vehicle owners as independent contractors to provide ridesharing services using their private vehicles. Ridesharing companies receive fees as a percentage of each trip recorded by their drivers. Ridesharing is a subset of the sharing economy.

Usage

Ballotpedia uses ridesharing to define this portion of the sharing economy rather than the phrases ride-hailing or ride-booking services recommended by the Associated Press Style Book.^[2] Associated Press recommends these phrases because of their distinction from the traditional use of ridesharing as a synonym for carpooling.^[3][4]

Ballotpedia's usage was determined after a review of articles, blog posts, and publications found ridesharing a more commonly used term than ride-hailing or ride-booking. The Google Trends chart below also shows the relative interest in these terms from July 2016 to July 2017 with ridesharing drawing more interest than ride-hailing as a search term. At the time of this search, Google did not have enough data on the term ride-booking to produce a trend line.

See also

• Local government responses to the sharing economy (ridesharing/homesharing)
• Sharing economy
• Homesharing

Footnotes