Wasn't this the whole point of "ride sharing" to begin with? Connecting people with similar start and end points to reduce the number of vehicles. When the "sharing economy" term first started going around it was in reference to something more akin to this. What we got instead was totally-not-taxis-but-actually-taxis like Uber and Lyft, and car sharing services like Car2Go and ZipCar. Both types of companies are very much NOT ride sharing. Apparently there were several others competing in that space as well. Uber had better hurry the fuck up with driverless cars, and put them on the road the same way they did their drivered cars. That is, ignoring any laws to the contrary and brute forcing their way through legal pushback.
I think Paul Carr, way back when before NSFWCorp was even playing patronage games, pointed out that Uber had a business plan for exactly as long as it took for Google to decide to take it from them. The parallel is Groupon: "Oh, you make money by making coupons for businesses? Great! We can roll that into AdWords without even having to hire anyone have fun with that IPO TTYL!" That's why they worked.so.hard to come up with a social network that isn't Facebook - they have no penetration into Facebook's market. They have no way to compete for Facebook's eyeballs. So while Facebook will never compete on Google's turf, Google will never compete on Facebook's, either.