Americans already spend an estimated 463 hours, or 19 days annually, inside their cars, 38 hours of which, on average (almost an entire work week), are spent either stalled or creeping along in traffic. Because congestion is now so prevalent, Americans factor up to 60 minutes of travel time for important trips (like to the airport) that might normally take only 20 minutes. All of this congestion is caused, to a significant degree, by a singular fact—that most commuters in the U.S. (76.4 percent) not only drive to work, but they drive to work alone. For people like Paul Minett, this number represents a spectacular inefficiency, all those empty and available passenger seats flying by on the highway like a vast river of opportunity. And so the next realm of transportation solutions is based on the idea that if we can’t build our way out of our traffic problems, we might be able to think our way out, devising technological solutions that try to fill those empty seats. A lot of that thinking, it turns out, has been happening in San Francisco. (...)
First launched in 2008, Avego’s ridesharing commuter app promised to extend the social media cloud in ways that could land you happily in someone’s unused passenger seat. Sean O’Sullivan, the company’s founder, has described their product as a cross between car-pooling, public transport, and eBay. By using the app, one could, within minutes, or perhaps a day in advance, find a ride with someone going from downtown San Francisco, say, to Sonoma County—with no more planning than it takes to update your Facebook page. Put this tool in the hands of many tens of thousands of users, so goes the vision, and add to it a platform for evaluating riders, a method of automated financial transactions, and a variety of incentives and rewards for participating in the scheme, and you could have something truly revolutionary on your hands.
Urban planners like Mark Hallenbeck, director of the Washington State Transportation Center at the University of Washington, see ridesharing as evidence of a paradigm shift from “thinking about corridors”—about building more and wider highways, for instance—to “thinking about markets.” That shift is happening in large part because there’s nowhere to put larger roads. Seattle, for instance, sits between two topographically limiting features—Lake Washington to the east and Puget Sound to the west. Interstate 5, the main north-south corridor on the West Coast, runs between the two. Widening Interstate 5 to eliminate traffic delays would require the construction of an additional fourteen lanes, according to Hallenbeck. “The reality is, that’s not going to happen,” he says, and not just in Seattle, but in most urban centers. “So, you say, what’s next?” Ridesharing could be one answer, harnessing the vast reservoir of empty seats and, in market terms, giving those empty seats a value, creating liquidity in a new marketplace of seats, passengers, and drivers.
It's worth pausing here to make a distinction between ridesharing and so-called peer-to-peer taxi services like Lyft, Uber, and Sidecar, which have gained considerable traction in larger cities. This became clear to me when, on my first day in San Francisco, I used Uber to arrange a trip from Japantown to Fort Mason in the Marina District. In the lobby of my hotel, I opened my Uber app and got a message that said, “Jose will be arriving in three minutes.” I walked out of the lobby, past the taxi stand, and within seconds a car slid up beside me, tinted window rolling down to reveal a handsome, friendly face asking, “Mark?” Jose was no shlub. He drove his own car, which fairly sparkled inside and out. He offered me a bottle of chilled water. Another driver, a beautician who asked to be called Amy because her boyfriend didn’t know she was working for Lyft, distributes late-night hangover gift bags. She arrived to take me to an interview waiving a Lyft trademark pink mustache out of her sunroof, and soon commenced a GPS-assisted navigation across town that seemed part taxi ride, part amusement park ride, and part therapy session. At the end of the trip, I wanted to pay my fare and ask her to marry me. Of course Lyft/Uber/Sidecar weren’t actual bona fide “ridesharing” operations, as Brant Arthur, manager of the WeGo project in Sonoma County, reminded me. “They weren’t taking cars off the road—they were just people driving around town in their own cars making extra money.” They were basically, in his words, “unregulated taxis.”
But an entrepreneur named Paul Kogan saw something striking in the way the Lyft app allowed you to view all the potential Lyft drivers in your area, in real time. With the help of a few partners, he founded a company called Hovee, and in May of 2013 launched a series of beta tests at several large Bay Area tech firms. “Our trigger was that screen,” Kogan told me. “The fact that you could now do this was important.” By “this,” Kogan meant match people up to share a certain experience. Kogan’s team turned to dating services for inspiration. They looked at the mobile app Tinder, which helps people locate each other for encounters of the flesh. “What’s interesting about carpooling services,” says Kogan, “is that you always come back to the dating analogy.” It was, of course, the analogy that Kogan’s team was interested in—transportation match-making to facilitate shared rides.
First launched in 2008, Avego’s ridesharing commuter app promised to extend the social media cloud in ways that could land you happily in someone’s unused passenger seat. Sean O’Sullivan, the company’s founder, has described their product as a cross between car-pooling, public transport, and eBay. By using the app, one could, within minutes, or perhaps a day in advance, find a ride with someone going from downtown San Francisco, say, to Sonoma County—with no more planning than it takes to update your Facebook page. Put this tool in the hands of many tens of thousands of users, so goes the vision, and add to it a platform for evaluating riders, a method of automated financial transactions, and a variety of incentives and rewards for participating in the scheme, and you could have something truly revolutionary on your hands.Urban planners like Mark Hallenbeck, director of the Washington State Transportation Center at the University of Washington, see ridesharing as evidence of a paradigm shift from “thinking about corridors”—about building more and wider highways, for instance—to “thinking about markets.” That shift is happening in large part because there’s nowhere to put larger roads. Seattle, for instance, sits between two topographically limiting features—Lake Washington to the east and Puget Sound to the west. Interstate 5, the main north-south corridor on the West Coast, runs between the two. Widening Interstate 5 to eliminate traffic delays would require the construction of an additional fourteen lanes, according to Hallenbeck. “The reality is, that’s not going to happen,” he says, and not just in Seattle, but in most urban centers. “So, you say, what’s next?” Ridesharing could be one answer, harnessing the vast reservoir of empty seats and, in market terms, giving those empty seats a value, creating liquidity in a new marketplace of seats, passengers, and drivers.
It's worth pausing here to make a distinction between ridesharing and so-called peer-to-peer taxi services like Lyft, Uber, and Sidecar, which have gained considerable traction in larger cities. This became clear to me when, on my first day in San Francisco, I used Uber to arrange a trip from Japantown to Fort Mason in the Marina District. In the lobby of my hotel, I opened my Uber app and got a message that said, “Jose will be arriving in three minutes.” I walked out of the lobby, past the taxi stand, and within seconds a car slid up beside me, tinted window rolling down to reveal a handsome, friendly face asking, “Mark?” Jose was no shlub. He drove his own car, which fairly sparkled inside and out. He offered me a bottle of chilled water. Another driver, a beautician who asked to be called Amy because her boyfriend didn’t know she was working for Lyft, distributes late-night hangover gift bags. She arrived to take me to an interview waiving a Lyft trademark pink mustache out of her sunroof, and soon commenced a GPS-assisted navigation across town that seemed part taxi ride, part amusement park ride, and part therapy session. At the end of the trip, I wanted to pay my fare and ask her to marry me. Of course Lyft/Uber/Sidecar weren’t actual bona fide “ridesharing” operations, as Brant Arthur, manager of the WeGo project in Sonoma County, reminded me. “They weren’t taking cars off the road—they were just people driving around town in their own cars making extra money.” They were basically, in his words, “unregulated taxis.”
But an entrepreneur named Paul Kogan saw something striking in the way the Lyft app allowed you to view all the potential Lyft drivers in your area, in real time. With the help of a few partners, he founded a company called Hovee, and in May of 2013 launched a series of beta tests at several large Bay Area tech firms. “Our trigger was that screen,” Kogan told me. “The fact that you could now do this was important.” By “this,” Kogan meant match people up to share a certain experience. Kogan’s team turned to dating services for inspiration. They looked at the mobile app Tinder, which helps people locate each other for encounters of the flesh. “What’s interesting about carpooling services,” says Kogan, “is that you always come back to the dating analogy.” It was, of course, the analogy that Kogan’s team was interested in—transportation match-making to facilitate shared rides.
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