E-bay for hitchhikers

E-bay lets you rate a seller after you buy something from them. This concept could be used in many more areas letting peers-to-peer networks replace current institutions. For instance, instead of having the government or a single business provide a city's transportation needs, people could organize rides on the web. All you would need to do is let people pick where they are and where they need to go, and up would pop a list of people who are going the same way and are looking to car pool, charge a small fee, or who are just looking for the company.

After each ride people could evaluate the other person. Of course people could choose to only ride with people of the same sex, and luckily for us, we live in an age of very little online privacy. Maybe you could have links to sites that do criminal checks or other things. In a perfect society this would be the way to go. It might also work in small towns, where everyone already knows each other, but they might not know the travel plans of their friends.

This might not work among the larger population, but if you were able to enter in people that you already know it may just work. For instance, I know about 30 people at work, and about 30 people at church, and about 30 people from school that I could catch rides to places with. If I wanted to go into town on any given Saturday, there is a chance I could catch a ride with one of them.

Reasons to agree:

We ought to e-bay everything, or in other words rate those that we have bought things from. We should be able to evaluate the interactions we have with any business, individual, corporation, government agency, etc.