Google’s mapping service Waze is launching a pilot carpooling app in Israel that connects commuters who want to travel to work together.
Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on Monday that the new app, called RideWith, will be available to users in greater Tel Aviv this week.
Much like the decades-old Casual Carpool system in the Bay Area, passengers will pay a small fee to the driver who picks them up. But they won’t have to wait on the sidewalk for a random driver, because the app uses Waze data to match commuters ridimg to and from the same place.
The newspaper explains:
“Passengers who want to share a ride will have to enter the addresses of their homes and their workplaces and the times they wish to travel. The application will match them up with a driver who follows the required route at the desired times by means of Waze, which will send the relevant driver an alert asking whether he is willing to pick up passengers. The alert will be sent only to relevant drivers, whose route to work is known on Waze to overlap with the passenger’s.”
Waze, bought by Google in 2013, was founded in Israel and has a big following there — one of the reasons why Google chose the country to launch the ride-sharing pilot that could eventually go global, Haaretz reports.
Waze also told Reuters that it is “conducting a small, private beta test in the greater Tel Aviv area for a carpool concept, but we have nothing further to announce at this time.”
Above: A screenshot of Silicon Valley traffic using the Waze app.
