Waze Wants to Help You Hitch a Ride

Bloomberg

The traffic app tries its hand at carpooling.

Over the almost four years since it paid $1.1 billion for navigation startup Waze, Google Inc.’s plans for the traffic-avoidance app haven’t always been clear—even to the people who work there. Di-Ann Eisnor, Waze’s head of growth, says she was languishing inside the Google behemoth; her stock options payout didn’t make her feel much better.

“I had just made a bunch of money. I should have been happy,” she says. In 2015, two years in, her feelings hadn’t changed much. Eisnor says she and other executives huddled in Waze’s Tel Aviv offices to ask, “How the hell are we going to stay here if we’re bored?”

Instead of leaving the company, the group decided to expand Waze beyond avoiding traffic accidents and speed traps. Waze Carpool, a separate app, started as a small pilot in Israel that year and is now also available in San Francisco and, soon, Brazil.

A more literal ride-sharing service than taxi alternatives such as Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc., Waze Carpool lets drivers schedule passenger pickups along their planned routes in exchange for a few bucks worth of gas money from riders, or even to just speed up their commutes with access to the carpool lane. Riders can book at the last minute or reserve in advance. To discourage cancellations, rider and driver profiles share personal information that the users have agreed to supply from Facebook or LinkedIn.

While the system can create some awkwardness—Eisnor says she won’t use the carpooling app to get herself home from the gym, because she’s leery of sweating in the driver’s car—she’s been encouraged by the results. Thousands of people are using Waze Carpool, and some drivers give the same people regular rides to work. Waze is preparing to expand the service to more cities around the world by the end of the year.

The company says the informal service isn’t meant to compete with the likes of Uber, an early Google investment turned bitter rival in the race for driverless cars. (Waymo, the self-driving car project owned by Google parent Alphabet Inc., said on May 14 that it will test and refine its technology in partnership with Lyft.)

The model’s closest analog may be BlaBlaCar, a Paris startup with an app that’s helped spread carpooling across Europe, or the informal hitch-a-ride spots in U.S. cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and Washington. Eisnor says her main goal is to reduce pollution and insists that Waze doesn’t want professional drivers involved. Each user can give only two rides per day, and fees are capped.

Read more of the original article at Bloomberg.com.

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