Ride-sharing takes on traffic
A friend-to-friend ridesharing app seeks to help beat Auckland’s traffic woes.
The congestion crunch on Auckland roads is no news flash, and getting across town at peak time can be a trial.
Localift, a ride-sharing app about to launch in New Zealand, aims to make it easier for people to get around by using family, friend and colleague networks to get from place to place.
The app user creates lift groups from their smart phone contact list and rides can be arranged with these lift groups directly through the app. All lifts are live-tracked.
The app provides one message to everyone in the lift group at the same time and keeps track of responses.
Localift was founded in Sydney by entrepreneurs Krystyna Weston and Stephen Coulter. They’ve partnered with former colleague Blair Glubb to bring Localift to New Zealand.
Coulter says that he and Weston wanted to make it easy for people to ask for help with free lifts among family, friends and colleagues.
‘‘What was missing was an app with a sophisticated ridehailing type experience,’’ Coulter says.
‘‘New Zealand has significant traffic issues, public transport networks that don’t support everyday commuters, meaning 70 per cent of us drive into work alone every day, and with limited parking,’’ Weston says.
‘‘Localift offers a solution to these problems and makes it easy for people to use their social networks to give and receive lifts,’’ she says.
The app also integrates messaging, maps, routing and calendars to help people coordinate their travel needs meaning more people travel- ling in fewer cars.
Glubb says that people can feel awkward or embarrassed about asking people they know for rides.
‘‘Localift normalises sharing lifts because when you join, your friends on the app are expecting to be asked for help and vice versa.’’
Glubb says that while there are some people happy to jump into a car with a stranger and pay for a journey, other people are not. He says that using the app will make it easy to share lifts with people who know each other.
Each ride is free and there is no exchange of cash between riders. Localift is free to download in app stores and the premium version will be free until 2017.
Go to local.net for more.