Sometimes I hear from people who don’t really understand the difference between carpooling and shared transport. And I admit, I can be almost irrational in how it bugs me when people don’t “get it”.
You know Paul Giamotti’s character on Sideways, you know, when he is talking with his buddy outside the restaurant? This is a guy who loves and live for wine, right? And he cannot believe that people order Merlot when they could instead get a Pinot or a Cabernet. In the scene, he threatens to walk out on his friend if the two beautiful girls they are on a date with order any #$%#^@ Merlot.
So while I perhaps don’t get as irrationally upset as the Paul Giamotti character does in that scene, I have been thinking about this idea seriously for about 10 years now (when I lived in LA), and I do differentiate between modes of transport quite distinctly. This Avego implementation really only got rolling about three years ago when I started forming the patents and technology, and then really got kicked off a bit over two years ago when Avego’s co-founders Harvey & Richard and I met up and made this a serious, full-time effort with a lot of engineers (15 R&D staff, actually, which is quite large for a start-up) and a lot of blood, sweat and tears.
Now, actually, I do think carpooling is really cool. And there certainly are a lot of similarities between carpooling and Avego’s Shared Transport. But the genericly available ridesharing computing capability that has existed, largely unchanged for about 10 years isn’t dynamic ride sharing… and it isn’t what we at Avego think of as “shared transport”.
What we call “Gen 1.0” ridesharing are all those quite brilliantly convenient websites and applications to find mostly-permanent ridesharing buddies to share a journey with. Because almost all these “Gen 1.0” solutions do use a website to find partners (and there are literally thousands of these Gen 1.0 ridesharing websites), it is the kind of thing you wouldn’t do on a daily basis… it’s just too much of a hassle, generally, to go to a website to search for one-off rides… while you would do it to go across the country (booking an airplane flight, for example), it isn’t the kind of thing you’d do before heading out to work in your car.
Most all the Gen 1.0 sites realize this and focus on generating long-term carpool partners. And many websites are fairly successful at doing this. After all, this isn’t about the technology so much as it is about the behavioral change, trying to get someone to feel comfortable about making a long-term commitment to carpool to work with another person. And so people are encouraged to call each other on the phone, meet up in a cafe to discuss the carpool arrangements, etc.
That’s what carpooling is, and that’s what most carpooling technology is geared towards. And it would be a truly great thing if it was even more successful than it already is. For a range of reasons, carpooling isn’t as successful as it could be, but we’ll look at that in some future blog. For now, let’s just note that about 12 million people *do* carpool in the United States alone, so it is a big deal, it’s being done a lot, and it would be done even more if it was more convenient to do it.
Now, what’s shared transport, and why is it different?
Well, let’s first look at how it’s the same as carpooling.
Shared transport and carpooling are *both* a driver choosing to share their car with other commuters. These commuters generally pay a portion of the commute expense (gas, tolls, parking, wear-and-tear on car). Like carpooling, sometimes the driver who drives one day may take a ride another day, depending on their schedule and personal choices. And in this way, both shared transport and carpooling are very similar.
Shared transport can also enable people to discover longer-term carpooling partners. A lot of people say, well geez, I could see people using shared transport to find their carpooling partner, but why would they continue to use the Avego system after that? (Because, after all, while it is nearly free to use Avego, Avego still does receive about 15% of the journey cost to cover our services). We’ll get into that in a later blog, but suffice it to say, there are a huge number of reasons why people will find it more convenient to use Avego on a regular basis than just do traditional carpooling (some of those reasons won’t become evident to people for another year or two, just trust me, we’re working on some great stuff).
For those that want to use Avego to find a carpooling partner and then stop using Avego, that’s fine, no problem. And, regular carpool people could always just use Avego to improve their carpooling experience (for example, letting riders know when the driver is running a few extra minutes late via the automatic route forecasting capability, automatically collecting and splitting the carpool fees, etc).
But shared transport is very different, as well, because it opens up whole new possibilities.
The only people who probably understand this in the United States are “sluggers” and “casual carpoolers”. “Sluggers” exist in Washington DC, and “casual carpoolers” exist in San Francisco. In both cases, large queues of people are quickly and efficiently loaded up into streams of private cars as they head toward high density travel corridors. Tens of thousands of people use these systems daily in these cities, with no major problems reported on these networks. It’s the no-technology version of Avego, and it works daily, already.
It’s an entirely different mode of transport (“Modes” of transport are the different ways that people can travel (bus, subway, taxi, car, carpooling, shared transport, commuter rail, etc)). Shared transport is completely “ad hoc”. You can take it to work in the morning and take the bus home after your night class. You can ride in with one driver and ride out with another.
Let me give you one other way in which shared transport is different. Unlike carpooling, you can take transfers. Huh? Yeah, that’s right. In a carpool, it would be essentially impossible to arrange the logistics to make transfers. In subways or buses, you can. And you will be able to in shared transport as well.
It’s because shared transport is, as we’ve explained before, a way of expanding the public transit system to work on every road that cars travel on, but with a frequency and a travel routing that enables people to be able to rely on it. The development of this network won’t happen overnight, just like broadband internet or rural electrification or wireless mobile phones didn’t happen overnight… it takes years to build a network as complex as these, and for most areas, it will for shared transport, as well.
At the top of this blog, I’ve posted a picture of our shared transport network operations center in Kinsale, it gives you an idea of the sophistication we think is necessary to manage the growth of these networks.
Ultimately, when a decent critical mass is reached on a given set of roads, schedules can be published as to what the general service availability is between places and on given routes in a city. Even with just a few thousand cars driving, shared transport will rapidly increase the viability of all forms of public transport during peak times of travel.
Avego does expect to be working with Gen 1.0 ridesharing applications, the kinds of systems that metropolitan planning organizations, private companies, State Departments of Transportation, etc., have been putting in place all over the world. We hope to enable the “live” version of carpooling, taking the same user base, but enabling the user base to bring the Avego “real-time” carpooling aspect to their user base. We have an open API that we’ve been developing that will support regular carpooling applications and websites with shared transport. If you are interested in working with us on this, write to us at info (at) avego.com.
That’s all for now!
