How big is carpooling market?

Is there still a demand of carpool as there are no apps that competes with Blablacar globally in their recent round company was valued over 3 Billion. What would we an ideal carpool app that can solve long distance travel problems?

rutvik2601 · a month ago

Thanks for all the insights and discussion here, really appreciate the range of perspectives.

I’ve actually been building a long-distance carpooling app called Carpooll.com for a while now. We're starting to scale across Canada and getting great early traction, especially among students and intercity travelers.

If anyone here is curious or wants to test it out, I’d be happy to share a TestFlight link for iOS or an APK for Android. I'm also very open to feedback, feature suggestions, or just chatting about what an ideal carpooling experience should look like.

Feel free to reply here

siamese_puff · a month ago

We should spend more time and energy improving pedestrian and cycling infrastructure and stop the growth of urban sprawl which makes you incorrectly think you need to solve this problem. A great book on this topic - Carmageddon

ls-a · a month ago

No I want a car

muzani · a month ago

You can have one. You just don't have to drive it every day.

farseer · a month ago

Carpool is perhaps the only means of commute that offers no timing flexibility. Unlike public transport or driving/cycling alone. I would think, its a rather small market preferred by people with shift jobs or state/federal employees who don't can't stay a minute below or above their office hours.

rutvik2601 · a month ago

True for traditional setups. But an ideal app can support flexible departure windows, last-minute rides, and alerts for near-matching trips, making carpooling feel less rigid and more like public transport on-demand

sloaken · a month ago

I think it is a great way to save money and help the environment.

The big problem I see is security / trust. But you have that risk with rideshare.

throwaway3b03 · a month ago

Lately blablacar has been charging hitchhikers/travelers up front. So you as a driver know for sure you won't end up with nothing. This is really useful IMO, but also mostly significantly reduce the popularity of the service in places with low reliability among members.

In western Europe, particularly Germany, it was still very easy to find people, in eastern Europe, not so much. Even though before this change, years ago, blablacar was very popular in said eastern Europe countries.