Nowadays, roads are more a sight of stagnant cars stuck in long traffics than moving cars. In fact, various state governments have also started various initiatives to curb the increasing figure of cars on roads and put a lid on the pollution problem. Car Free Day is one such initiative started by the Haryana government in Gurgaon and more recently in Delhi. The concept borrowed from the west, encourages the citizens to ditch their vehicles once a week and share a ride to office or use the public transport.
In 2009, carpooling represented 43.5% of all trips in the United States and 10% of commute trips. In India however, carpooling is still a relatively new concept which hasn't it picked up traction in the Indian Market yet. The Indian market is exactly at an infant stage in terms of the ride sharing or carpooling market.
Even though, India do have handful of homegrown ride-sharing or carpooling startups/apps such as Zify, sRide, Ridingo, among others, are providing its users decent platform which can be used for sharing rides.
Now, a relatively new carpooling app - ShareACar, claims to be adding practicality to carpooling as we know it.
ShareACar is a realtime ride-sharing app that helps connecting real verified users to share their rides together and helps them save fuel and environment in the process. The users can do the sharing in their own vehicles or book a cab for the same.
ShareAcar's co-founders - Rohit Karan and Shobhit Srivastava, both alumnus of IIT Kanpur, came up with the idea for ShareACar after realising the traffic epidemic that the Indian cities are suffering from. They realised that even though everyone wanted the problem to be solved but yet no one did anything concrete about the same. They also realised that even though most of the people were in favour of the idea of carpooling but yet they didn't consider it as a safe and practical option.
Mumbai-based ShareACar aims to solve this lifelong taboo associated with carpooling and ease commuting problems in Indian cities.
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Shobhit Srivastava and Rohit Karan [/caption]There are many other carpooling players currently existing in the market, but no one has been able to make carpooling as practical an option as they have. They distinguish themselves from others in the market by offering the users a solution where people are empowered with no fixed fares (upto a certain cap), no route matching algorithm and complete flexibility to decide who they want to travel with. Further, every cash transaction is done through an online wallet, hence providing the people with an option to travel cashless.
The app has an attractive and super easy to use map based UI on which users can put in their coordinates. Further, the app is completely real time in order to ensure no unnecessary pre planning.
The startup which is self funded till now, has seen some 250 odd users registering over the last few weeks since its launch. Further, around 45 rides have already been shared on the app over the last 3 weeks.
The Mumbai based app plans to increase its presence in other cities in the coming future and is tying up with various agencies for the same.
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