Waze Carpool is nothing like using Lyft and Uber — and that’s the point
While heading home in a gray Honda Pilot the other day, I couldn’t help but look down at my phone, trying to follow along on the route my driver was taking me.
But this wasn’t an Uber or Lyft ride; it was a Waze Carpool, a shared ride option from the Google-owned traffic navigation app that’s been available everywhere Waze works in the U.S. and three other countries (Brazil, Israel, and Mexico) for the past year. Just last month alone, the carpool option hit 550,000 rides globally. As Josh Fried, the head of Waze Carpool, explained at the company's San Francisco offices, the app should provide rides to 1 million people per month by early 2020. In the U.S. in the past year, already 25 million miles were carpool miles.
The separate Carpool app for both riders and drivers is a digital version of the traditional casual carpool experience. You go to predetermined pick-up spots to fill your car with enough bodies to commute through the carpool or high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes. It also works if you're trying to find fellow coworkers or classmates who live nearby or along your route to work or school who can throw down a buck or two for a toll road or gas money. Waze Carpool drivers only go 3 to 4 minutes out of their way on average to pick up more people in what would usually be a solo ride, Fried said.
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The ride-hailing apps we're used to offer options that sound like a carpool — Uber Pool and Lyft Shared rides and the app Via, billed as a carpooling service — but they're structured around a driving service with an independent contractor earning fares for rides.
For Waze, it's different. Carpool driving isn’t a livelihood like Uber and Lyft driving, but a way to earn some gas money or save time commuting home, Fried emphasized. “This is never going to be a fulltime job,” he said. After you’ve driven one morning and one evening commute, you’re done and limited for the day from offering more rides on the app. Again, it’s nothing like ride-hailing.
Conditioned by the Uber and Lyft experience, when I looked at the app while on a demo ride with Fried, I expected to see a real-time location and route and any other riders we were picking up. Waze is a much chiller, almost bare-bones experience. Once in the car you'll see simply a route overview and estimated arrival time to a destination that may be close to your final point if not always directly there. It’s the same for pickups; you may need to walk to a nearby driver heading your way.
Or maybe you’ll luck out and someone from your office building is offering a seat. Waze works with companies like Samsung, Old Navy, and Amazon to encourage its employees to carpool together. Drivers can even directly invite someone into their car, which is so un-Uber like.
Waze Carpool isn’t free, but in some rare situations it can be. For riders, it's usually only a few dollars (depending on the commute length) to get in a car and commute. If a driver just wants to hit the HOV requirements they can offer a ride for nothing or a nominal $1. The most popular Carpool days are Wednesdays, and 8 a.m. is prime pickup time.
Waze has added some features that are more reminiscent of ride-hailing, like profile descriptions and predilections. If a driver allows smoking or pets (much like the recently announced Uber Pet) they can mark that. (Fried said almost 50 percent of riders are OK with pets in the car.) Drivers can also post optional details about their car, like the make and model, and they can use whatever car they have legal access to, whether they’re borrowing a friend’s ride or renting something while their usual car is at the mechanic. It’s not like the Lyft experience where a driver is connected to a certain vehicle.
Riders can mark down preferences as well, like chattiness level. Nearly 40 percent of riders select "chatty" on their profiles; only 14 percent say they prefer a quiet ride. Of course, you're carpooling — so much for Uber's "quiet mode." As with Uber and Lyft's popularity in big cities, Waze is most used in the San Francisco Bay area, Southern California, Dallas, Seattle, and the Washington, D.C., area, all big commuting hubs.
So while we’ve become accustomed to using our phones to request an on-demand ride, we can switch it up to find a car and commute to work or home in a true, honest carpool — for a fraction of the fare.
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
