Carpooling service Ride launches in Atlanta to alleviate rush hour traffic

Ride is bringing its carpooling service for commuters to Atlanta, Georgia this week. This is the first time the company has created a direct-to-consumer offering, putting it in competition with carpooling services from Uber and Lyft.

Starting Monday, people in Atlanta will be able to download the Ride app and connect with other commuters who are going the same direction to work. The app matches people based on their route, proximity to one another, and employer.

The reason Ride decided to launch in Atlanta is because the city is known for its congested highways. The company says that the average commute time is 30 minutes each way, with 78 percent of commuters driving solo.

“The thing about Atlanta is that the employers are concentrated,” said Ride CEO Ann Fandozzi. What makes Atlanta an ideal test market is that there are two main arteries that funnel into the city, both of which have HOV lanes for carpools. And as Fandozzi points out, most of the city’s main employers are located in a central hub.

Ride first launched in April of this year as a commuter service for universities and businesses. It was developed to give people an easy way to share the costs of commuting with coworkers (rather than complete strangers) in efforts to take cars off the road and lower the potential for traffic. To maximize cost efficiency, Ride gave drivers willing to take the maximum number of commuters access to an SUV or minivan.

So far the company has inked deals with Stanford University, University of Delaware, and businesses in Portland, Oregon. It’s also on-boarded 3,000 registered users.

Atlanta is the first city where Ride is being deployed broadly. In its other locations Ride operates exclusively through its roster of business clients. However, if all goes well in Atlanta, Ride will want to expand its carpooling service to other cities with oppressive traffic flows. That will likely put it in competition with Uber and Lyft, two services that have already rolled out their own carpooling features (Uberpool and Lyft Line) in markets like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

But what differentiates Ride from Uberpool and Lyft Line is that it isn’t a cab service. Ride divides up commuting costs and then facilitates payments between passengers and their drivers. For those services it charges a “small” fee. Splitting the cost of gas between four or five people is likely cheaper than taking a cab, even if you’re splitting it with one other person. Plus, with Ride commuters get to travel with same people every day (rather than getting a new driver every time they call a car).

Uber and Lyft are fairly established players to come up against, but Ride has a powerful team behind it. The company’s chief technology officer is Oscar Salazar, Uber’s first CTO, and Ride is majority-owned by TPG Growth, an Uber investor.

Ride also isn’t directly competing with either of these companies. Carpooling isn’t Uber or Lyft’s core-business. Rather, Line and Uberpool are more about shaving the price of a regular cab ride by splitting it between two customers going the same way. So while some people may be using these services for their morning commute, that use case probably doesn’t constitute the majority. Line and Uberpool also likely represent a small fraction of Uber and Lyft’s overall revenue. That’s good for Ride, because it means it has the opportunity to reach a market that isn’t really being served.