Find a Carpool Buddy With Waze to Save on Gas and Reduce Your Carbon Footprint
We all know car sharing is an easy way to reduce our environmental impact, but finding people to team up with can sometimes be tricky. This week, Waze introduced a new feature that will make it much easier to find these fellow travelers.
Waze Carpool was launched in 2016 in California and has since been tested in several cities in the US and overseas. Wednesday Waze has officially begun rolling out the service to all 50 states in the United States.
It works like a combination of Uber and Airbnb. Racers and drivers create profiles and then choose who they want to ride with. As a driver, you can specify criteria – perhaps you only want to drive with coworkers, and not with someone else who travels along the same path. Or perhaps you only want to ride with people of the same gender. Thus, you have a little more control over who gets into your car than you do on average.
The site gives both riders and drivers a star rating, so you can weed out people who may have been loaded from their last ride for bad behavior (or bad driving).
To be a driver, you use the traditional Waze app . Riders need the dedicated Waze Carpool app. Both are available for both iOS and Android.
Drivers can start the process by clicking on the little man icon in the lower right corner of the app. From there, you will be asked to enter your home and work addresses (which are kept secret) and information about when you go to work and when you come home each day. You will also be prompted to connect your Facebook or Google account to verify your identity and help highlight mutual friends you might have with Carpool.
Once you’ve created your profile, other Waze users (using this Carpool app) may ask you to drive.
The rides are cheap but not free. Passengers are currently charged $ 0.54 per mile (IRS refund rate) per passenger. So if you’re driving, this isn’t exactly a get-rich-quick scheme, but it can help offset some of your fuel costs as well as some of your carbon emissions.