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Google is now offering commuters a way to get to work. Wednesday, the mapping application of the company, Waze, has opened its carpool service to the rest of the United States.
Waze is best known as a crowdsourcing-based live mapping application. It has 110 million active users in the country. Its carpooling application was launched in 2016 in San Francisco. Over the past year, the company has expanded its service to 13 states, including the rest of California, Texas, Washington State, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Nevada. It has also launched the application in Israel and Brazil and plans to bring this service to Europe.
The carpool app allows people to search for nearby people who are heading to the same work area or even to the same office and then share the cost of a ride.
"We tried to create a cheaper version of a ride-hail application," says Noam Bardin, CEO of Waze, about the company's initial efforts. "But what was missing, it was the human element" application with new filters to refine the search process, making it easier to search for trips with people belonging to their network of friends or to colleagues. He also introduced the ratings and the choice to choose the driver's gender.
The fundamental task that Waze aims to solve is the reduction of traffic. "We do not think it will take a significant investment from government or technology to solve this problem," said Bardin.
Waze did not attract the same kind of attention as some of Google's other projects, like its self-driving car project, Waymo, for example. The latter frequently praises its kilometers traveled on public roads (10 million to date) and its virtual kilometers traveled (7 billion). Meanwhile, its Arizona autonomous driving service, for some 400 runners, naturally attracts a lot of attention.
But Waze is just as interesting. The service, now national, competes with Lyft and Uber, who offer their own commute options for commuter crowds. Of course, the ride-hail platforms differ from Waze. Drivers on Waze Carpool are not professionals, for example. These are just ordinary people. And the runners do not pay their tickets; they pay essentially for the essence. In addition, Waze does not take a share of the money that goes from one rider to another, although Bardin says that this will be the case once the service has reached a sufficient density.
"We do not add cars to the road like snowmobiles do," says Josh Fried, director of Waze Carpool.
Waze works in partnership with government agencies, schools and businesses to allow people to carpool. It also gives Google access to data from groups on routes, travel, traffic and information about runners, drivers, and what's needed for a good group trip. Lyft and Uber both claimed that this type of data is vital in a world where cars drive independently. Waze and Waymo are not working together yet. But in the end, it's easy to see how Waymo's autonomous cars could fit into the Waze carpool network.
"We hope to do it," says Bardin, who said he works with Waymo, but points out that both companies are still in their infancy and that it does not make sense to waste resources to work together. In the meantime, Waze is striving to give cities and commuters the means to help reduce traffic today by regrouping.
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