Announcing UberPool

I'm a little surprised at the choice of "Pool" instead of more conventional terms in the sharing economy such as "UberShare" or "UberContribute." I was very disappointed that UberPool isn't a swimming-pool-as-a-service.

Sounds very similar to Hitch[0] which launched a couple of months ago in SF. It sounds very useful for long, expensive trips (e.g., cross bay, down to south bay) where the fixed cost of picking up or dropping off another passenger is a smaller factor.<p>On an unrelated note, how is the form at the bottom supposed to update you when UberPool is in your area? Area codes are going to be inaccurate for anybody who&#x27;s moved since they got their cell phone number.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.takehitch.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.takehitch.com&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m a periodic Uber user and tend to use it later when public transit isn&#x27;t running. This would be interesting, and if cheap enough, could be more convenient than waiting for a bus if you&#x27;re in an area where they don&#x27;t run frequently and it&#x27;s storming, extremely hot, you don&#x27;t want to wait around.<p>I also just tried out Car2Go which costed me ~$15. The same trip from Uber, albiet at a different time of day, costs $9-12, and I get a driver. If Uber&#x27;s pricing is even lower due to car sharing, then services like ZipCar and Car2Go may be in a little trouble.<p><i>Of course, I realize if you&#x27;re going to pick something up from a hardware store or whatever you may not want to use Uber, but for many types of trips using a service like Uber or Lyft is better and more convenient than driving yourself</i>

&gt;&gt;Even if we don’t find an UberPool match for you, we’ll give you a discount on your ride.<p>That&#x27;s huge.<p>A huge problem Hitch faces is having enough demand-side riders on the market to make the marketplace viable [1]<p>Uber is going to be <i>subsidizing the demand-side of the marketplace</i> until the marketplace matures and demand fills in.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.crewlab.net/uberpool" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crewlab.net&#x2F;uberpool</a>

There is a car sharing service in France called Blah Blah. Passengers have rated &quot;Blah&quot; so you don&#x27;t have to share ride with people who speak less or more than you usually.<p><a href="http://www.blablacar.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.blablacar.com&#x2F;</a>

It would be interesting if Uber quantified carbon requirements per passenger mile and used this rating to encourage users to share rides. Uber users could get benefits or discounts for being green.

We&#x27;re building a similar service at Teleport, and recently ran a few numbers on the benefits of this sort of trip sharing assuming large scale and self driving EV&#x27;s. Really can change the entire transport experience in cities - cleaner, faster, safer, cheaper. <a href="http://teleprt.com/50-cities/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;teleprt.com&#x2F;50-cities&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;ve been waiting for something like this to arrive for a while. In Israel and the West Bank, services called sheiruts act as mini-buses; they&#x27;re taxis that pick up multiple passengers going in the same direction, usually for the same price as a public bus ticket. When buses are scarce, they are a really useful service. Could UberPool be like this?

A lot of people have tried this idea before, but they&#x27;ve never had the infrastructure or users to pull it off. Uber definitely has the infrastructure, but I suppose time will tell whether enough users sign up for it.<p>Imagined future scenario, though: UberPool Buses. At the right peak times it could work, but I wouldn&#x27;t like to use it in New York.

Where can I bet that Google will buy Uber and make self-driving Uber cars? (I am not joking, do people know where I can place a bet on this?)

What happens if you are requesting a ride and have a friend or two with you? UI could get a little complicated. And will they charge extra now if there is more than one rider?

Almost in every single other country this has always been the way to ride a taxi.<p>&quot;This is also a bold social experiment.&quot; come on!<p>They&#x27;re making it sound like they discovered nuclear fusion.

Based one what time you typically leave the house and where you go everyday, I&#x27;m certain there&#x27;s also room to mature this market by suggesting carpooling groups to anyone who has tried to use the service at least once:<p>For all users who try UberPool at least once, find clusters where they all leave regularly at approximately the same time and head to the same destination.<p>Uber can even ask something like &quot;Do you mind if we collect your commuting data for 1 week. If there is low variability, find clusters and suggest routes.<p>It think this could work bananas in places like SF-SouthBay, SouthBay-SF, and Washington DC where a sizeable chunk of people move back and forth in the same direction each day.

Now if this worked for my commute, that would be amazing. Would take it in an instant when the trains were far apart.

Along the lines of reducing fossil fuel consumption and having just returned from a trip to Copenhagen and Amsterdam, I really wish the bicycling culture was better embraced in the States in the bigger cities. NYC has Citibike which I find fantastic! But DC doesn&#x27;t have the density of bike stations to make it convenient. How are the other cities? Miami, Chicago, San Fran, etc?

&quot;Our friends at Google will also be joining us in the beta. They share our vision of a more energy-efficient world with less traffic congestion and pollution in our cities and are excited to be early adopters of UberPool.&quot;<p>I don&#x27;t quite understand what that means. Are they saying that all Google employees have access to the beta, or is Google involved in some other way?

This reminds me of Via[0]:<p>&quot;Shared rides in a premium SUV or Mercedes van. As fast as a taxi at a fraction of the price.&quot;<p>All of the competition in ride sharing has been great in the Bay Area. UberX is sometimes in a price range closer to riding the bus or BART.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.ridewithvia.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ridewithvia.com&#x2F;</a>

People have talked about Uber as a way to reduce pollution and wasteful driving, and the limits of Uber&#x27;s ability to do so since it still needs to address peak usage.<p>If they make this work, the Uber could turn out to be a huge environmental boon, reducing both the number of cards manufactured as well as fuel and road usage.<p>Hope it works...

I like the general idea but don&#x27;t completely get it<p>&gt; just happens to be requesting a ride along a similar route &gt; Uber from the Castro to the Financial District<p>Isn&#x27;t 90% of the time it&#x27;s like, one person goes to the Financial District, and the other one will just drop off Mid-Market, or just a few blocks towards SOMA, thank you?<p>So do you get stuck waiting until there is a person with just the same exact route, or how is this partially-overlapping ride determined and split? You detour a few blocks to the right to accommodate the &quot;nearby SOMA&quot; person? But what if the original person says, screw SOMA, I&#x27;m not paying or waiting for any detours, I need to get to FD on a straight line asap.<p>Sounds pretty hard, matching millions of similar but different routes.

This is interesting. It&#x27;s potentially a bridge into &quot;mass&quot; transit.<p>Sam Altman&#x27;s insight about his own (high end) car use and the potential cost of replacing it completely with Uber is one legitimate example of how they could expand beyond of the taxi market. I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s impossible for uber to have a few hundred or thousand core users in major cities that spend $10,000 per year on Uber. That only really applies to a small group of wealthy individuals.<p>But, the real big markets are usually nearer the bottom of the pyramid.

Cab With Me[1] is doing this in NYC right now (head of biz dev here). MIT came out with a study[2] that showed ~80% of cab rides in 2011 could have been shared, if there was an easy facilitator.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.welcome.cabwith.me/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.welcome.cabwith.me&#x2F;</a> [2] <a href="http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2014/03/how-system-shared-taxi-rides-could-transform-new-york-city/8530/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.citylab.com&#x2F;cityfixer&#x2F;2014&#x2F;03&#x2F;how-system-shared-t...</a>

In NYC, a startup called Bandwagon has been doing this--matching users going the same way--for awhile now, and is pioneering a system for shared rides at the taxi lines of airports and events.<p>This is what they did at CES: <a href="http://blog.bandwagon.io/post/92569728340/meet-the-hop-lane-upgrading-the-taxi-line-by-sharing" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.bandwagon.io&#x2F;post&#x2F;92569728340&#x2F;meet-the-hop-lane-...</a>

How soon are we going to see demonstrations of Uber drivers complaining about Uberpoolers taking their business?

Seems like Uber will eventually converge on a model of privately-owned publicly-accessible mass transportation.

This could easily be extended to larger vehicles (minibus) plying regular and popular routes at peak times. Do a pick up from a few square blocks and drop in a particular work district. Could be more convenient than a bus and eventually approach the same pricepoint.

A buddy of mine already made and launched the exact same thing (without Uber branding, obviously): <a href="http://www.jumpinstudent.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jumpinstudent.co.uk&#x2F;</a><p>It was really successful; and he got bought out for a decent sum of money.

I wonder how well this would work in a less concentrated city than SF. Uber doesn&#x27;t even go to my house (S of an interstate in DFW area) though I don&#x27;t know why; maybe it&#x27;s a volume problem which would make pooling even less likely.

There&#x27;s some weird styling going on in the &quot;Mobile Number&quot; input box: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/bSG9eKx.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;bSG9eKx.png</a>

For a service that entirely depends on network effect, they surely aren&#x27;t making adoption easy. It&#x27;s the same mistake Google made with Google+.

With all the data, carpooling&#x2F;sharing a ride is great.<p>But please, the phrase &quot;game changer&quot; is horribly overused today &amp; diluted.

The most exciting thing about Uber and Lyft launching these sharing services is not owning a car in the future. What do you think?

Every time I read about Uber I wonder who the target market is. Then I remember that as a father of three young boys our car has three car-seats in the back row, a CD in the CD player and more in the glovebox to keep the boys quiet, snacks in the center console to placate them when they&#x27;re hungry, and a stroller in the trunk. And then I realize that Uber is made by and for young, single, childless people with lots of money who live in SF and NY.

re: beta signup.<p>How will they know if I&#x27;m in their area? I wonder if they cross-referencing my phone # with my existing Uber account.

In case any Uber employee is looking: scrolling on this page is almost non-functional on an iPhone.

Is uber trying to eat its own tail?

I wonder how this will influence the legal problems Uber has here in Germany.

Shared taxis have existed for long time. This is just optimized with the iPhone app. It&#x27;s really time vs money. You are paying less but it will likely be longer trip since the other rider is not likely going to your exact location.

The signup form doesn&#x27;t work in firefox nightly :&#x2F;

The First Name and Last Name fields do not appear to work in Firefox. The input is correctly entered, but the text is not Visible.<p>Disabling the box-sizing: border-box shows the content. Anyone ever run into an issue like this before?

Ride-sharing that can actually work!

I believe Uber will be successful with this idea and kill quite a few startups in the process.

This is obviously a data grab.<p>Also has the potential to kill their own service. Very smart.