Starting in September, many people looking to share a ride to work will have to find a new way to do it, because Google-owned Waze is shutting down its carpooling service.
The company will start winding down the service starting next month after six years in operation. It cited changing travel behaviors related to the Covid-19 pandemic as the reasoning behind its decision.
“While Waze was predominantly a commuting app pre-COVID, today the proportion of errands and travel drives have surpassed commutes,” Waze told The Verge. “This means we have an opportunity to find even more impactful ways to bring together a global community to share real-time insights and help each other outsmart traffic — this is what has always made Waze truly special.”
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First launched in 2016 in San Francisco, Waze Carpool was different than carpool services offered by other companies like Uber and Lyft, because it allowed non-professional drivers to offer rides to people traveling along a similar route as them for a nominal fee. The service eventually expanded to all 50 states, as well as Brazil and Israel, before launching as a standalone app in 2018.
Waze always insisted that it did not offer the service in order to make money, instead vowing to use its “superior routing technology” to help commuters fill empty seats in their cars in the hopes of reducing the number of total cars on the road.
Carpooling has been on a decline since the ’70s, though, when the gas crisis pushed around 20 percent of Americans to share rides on the way to work. Today that number is down to just nine percent, and the pandemic as well as the move towards working from home discouraged the practice further. High gas prices and rises in fare prices, though, are encouraging more and more people to try carpooling once again.
Waze, however, is done with the service and said it will explore other ways it can help serve its 150 million worldwide customers.
