In an effort to relieve the city roads from congestion, the taxi-hailing app Uber is planning to initiate its carpooling service. This is the first car sharing project in India. The service is currently present in San Francisco, New York, Boston, Austin and Paris.
In a press release on Monday, Uber told that the carpooling service, UberPool is expected to go live in the coming weeks. The design of the service is such that the rider can share a ride with a person wanting to take a similar route. Uber will notify the co-riders’ first name. The riders can the split the cost. This would one side help them save up to 50% but, riding time would increase by a few minutes.
The Times of India reports that Uber will use the Bengaluru experiment to gain insights from commuter adoption and usage before extending the service to other cities.
Uber chose the city to launch its ride sharing project as Bengaluru is tech-friendly, adaptive and a mature market.
The newspaper quoted Bhavik Rathod, GM-Bengaluru, Uber, as saying “The city has fewer arterial roads. If you look at a majority of cars on the roads, they have a single driver passenger. We believe our carpooling product increases utilization through our existing fleet. And we have seen a trend where trips originate in the same location and ends in the same place“
“India is a top global priority for Uber along with China. With UberPool, we'll aim to achieve this vision, one we share with policy makers, to make Bengaluru a city of the future -one that looks a whole lot greener, cleaner, and more efficient thanks to fewer cars and more shared rides,“ Rathod said.
Uber’s rival in India, Ola too is working on a similar project. The taxi aggregator has tentatively decided on calling the car sharing service as Ola Share.