John Arlidge
The Sunday Times
It’s 6pm. Simone Hamilton has just finished teaching a poetry workshop for 14-16-year-olds and needs a ride home. She “hates Uber”, resents paying Lyft’s surge pricing and dislikes crowded buses and trains.
So she takes out her iPhone and taps a new app — ReachNow. In a few minutes, a small SUV pulls up to take her from Seattle Rep, where she runs the theatre’s community engagement programme, to her home in the Capitol Hill area for a few dollars more than an Uber, but more comfortably — and, she feels, more safely.
“An Uber driver once dropped me off five blocks from my home at 3am,” she recalled, frowning. “He was running two accounts and had already accepted another job nearby.”
ReachNow, owned by…
