Ridesharing apps could finally be carpooling's coming of age

When a taxi picked me up in Milton on a recent weekday morning, I was pretty excited. I knew that this ride could be part of a belated paradigm shift in transportation.

My revolutionary ride looked just like a slightly unclean taxicab, because it was.

Matt Monteyne, the chief operating office and co-founder of RideCo, met me at my friend’s rented town home on a quiet residential street in Milton that morning and rode in the taxi with me to the GO Station.

His company has partnered with the City of Milton and Metrolinx on a pilot project to demo RideCo’s new ridesharing system that gets people from their homes to the GO.

A user orders a ride on a smartphone app, and either a taxicab or a mini bus comes to their door. Along the way, the driver may pick up other passengers who live on the way and are also going to the GO Station.

My ride showed up on time. Monteyne was the only other passenger.

We had a pleasant, uneventful ride to the GO Station — exactly what you want on your morning commute. At $1.95 each, it was cheaper than getting a traditional cab, because it was shared, a la Uber POOL; and because it was shared, there was one at least one fewer vehicle on the road.

In Milton, RideCo is solving a specific problem: the GO Station parking lot is often full. People want to take the GO Train to Toronto because it’s fast and peaceful and because it bypasses the congested highways. But they drive to the station because there’s limited bus service in Milton.

From my friend’s home, it’s a half-hour’s winding walk to the GO Station through a neighbourhood full homes that look very much like my friend’s. And taking the bus doesn’t get you there much faster than walking: it’s a 16-minute walk to the nearest stop.

“This is what we call the first-and-last-mile problem,” Monteyne said. “You’re never going to find a better way to get from Milton to downtown Toronto than hopping on the GO Train, but how do you get people to that GO Train?”

RideCo fixes another problem by abandoning the concept of a fixed schedule.

“We collect the hundreds of people who are booking rides and we have a cloud-based logistics solution that is constantly generating the best itineraries, these pick-up routes, to move as many people with as few vehicles as possible,” he said.

Because the routes are constantly changing, the driver is only told where to go on the fly. If someone orders an immediate ride, the itinerary could change to allow for the pickup while the taxi is already en route, Moneyne said.

RideCo is currently only offering service to and from the Milton GO Station, but Monteyne said he’s been in early talks with other communities that have different transportation needs.

“I think we’re going to see a huge shift toward this in the next few years.”

Governments have been encouraging people to carpool for decades. There’s even an iconic Second World War propaganda poster (see below) that equates solo driving with Nazism in a bid to encourage motorists to conserve gas for the war effort.

But as today’s nearly empty HOV lanes illustrate, carpooling has always been easier said than done.

For years, there have been websites that match people with strangers who are carpooling on the same routes, but all of them require co-ordinating schedules. Unless everyone in the group leaves work at a set time every day, someone’s out of luck.

But the ubiquity of smartphones and backend technology that can match people on the fly, makes the problem disappear.

Monteyne said RideCo is offering the primary benefit of carpooling — the ability to split the cost and hassle of commuting — with the added benefit of flexibility.

“It enables a move from fixed routes and fixed times to something that’s a bit more dynamic,” he said.

Uber POOL, the version of Uber allowing users to make their taxi ride cheaper by allowing the driver to pick up other passengers who are going in the same direction, is very similar to RideCO.

While Uber repeatedly refused to grant Metro an interview for this story, a spokesperson sent along some data that suggests people have embraced Uber POOLing in San Fransisco, L.A., New York and Paris, where it’s available at all times. In San Francisco, Uber says thousands of users take POOL more than five times in a week, suggesting they use it as a commuting option.

Uber POOL recently launched in Toronto for the duration of the Pan Am Games. Lyft and Sidecar also offer carpooling options in some U.S. cities

Even though RideCO has only been in full operation since June, after a limited launch in May, it’s catching on. It currently has about 750 passengers a month and is growing fast. Unlike Uber, Lyft and SideCar, which have run into regulatory problems almost everywhere they’ve launched, RideCo is operating in partnership with the local authorities, as a public, rather than private, transportation option.

“It seems to be incredibly ‘sticky’: about half of the people who try it become weekly active users,” Monteyne said, “and that tells us it’s meeting a need.”