Celebrating three years of Arcade City

Today we celebrate the third anniversary of Arcade City with the global release of our version three mobile app, available now for Android and iOS. Here’s a look back on an exciting three years.

ACT 1 — New Hampshire

New Years 2016, 2am —

A young man and woman were walking along a dark and snowy road leaving downtown Portsmouth.

I pulled up alongside them. “Do you need a ride? We’re giving free rides tonight.”

“YES.”

They were among the 10,000 visitors to Portsmouth for the annual New Years celebration. They could not find a ride back to their hotel 1.5 miles away, so they were walking. (And New Hampshire winter nights are not known for nice weather.)

Amidst a months-long turf war between taxis and Uber, the main Portsmouth taxi companies staged a boycott that night, and Uber had been banned. Hundreds of people at least, maybe thousands, were massively inconvenienced.

We had organized ten rideshare drivers to volunteer free rides that night. About 50 rides were prescheduled through a form on the new Arcade City website. After finishing those, we fanned out across Portsmouth offering rides to people who looked stranded. We didn’t completely solve the shortage, but we did make a big difference for those 100 or so people we transported.

Our effort made local and national news as the Associated Press ran a wire story that got picked up in newspapers across the US. After we announced plans to build a peer-to-peer rideshare app, the tremendous response from drivers — many suffering from the January 2016 Uber and Lyft rate cuts that decimated their take-home pay up to 20–40% overnight — convinced us of the need to go global sooner than later.

Our arguments resonated then — and they still do today. A quote from our January 2016 interview:

Imagine a decentralized Uber that connects drivers with customers peer-to-peer using the Ethereum blockchain. When we hit $2 billion in annual revenue, it won’t go to line the pockets of investors or sustain a corporate hierarchy. It will be reinvested in our drivers, and in improving the customer experience. Driver engagement is key. Thanks to our Free Uber campaign, I got to connect and speak with Uber drivers all over the country. Dealing with government regulation is definitely an issue for drivers, but an even bigger issue has been drivers being mistreated by the distant corporate HQ. I’ve been a driver myself, working sometimes 50 hours per week. I’ve been to the meetings. I’ve seen firsthand how drivers are treated and how feedback is ignored. Uber and Lyft are run by nerds in San Francisco. To them, drivers are just numbers. The fares that determine drivers’ livelihood are just levers to push and pull to maximize profit. The driver uproar and mass protests following last week’s rate decrease tells me this is the perfect time to launch a decentralized alternative.

We’ve believed since the beginning that a decentralized Uber should eventually use a blockchain like Ethereum. But our focus has always been on mainstream usability now and solving the pain points of non-technical users today, not a theoretical future where blockchain usability and scalability issues are solved. (Three years later, it’s still uncertain when those issues will be solved — and we would be stupid to wait to expand our service until they are.)

So we began with an early MVP app. It worked great for two months from February to April, and eventually overwhelmed our ability to keep up with the demand because at that time we were centrally vetting all drivers. We decided to take the app offline while we figured out a more scalable model.

Then Austin happened.

ACT 2 — Austin

In May 2016, Uber and Lyft both shut down service in Austin, the eighth-largest rideshare market in the US, and were gone for a full year.

Arcade City was the first of ten rideshare startups that raced to Austin to fill the void they left behind.

Smart media folks predicted at the time that ‘the next Uber’ may well arise from this rideshare battle royale. We agreed.

Fast forward two and a half years. Every single for-profit rideshare that came to Austin to fill the void is now gone — except Arcade City.