Uber has finally brought its carpooling service, called UberPOOL, to India. As to whether it had hired separate drivers for UberPOOL, Karun Arya, Uber’s Uber’s communications lead for Southeast Asia and India, said that UberPOOL drivers “tend to be on-trip a larger percentage of the minutes of an hour”, resulting in added income. UberPOOL will be launched in some other cities in India soon, after the company gains insights into commuter adoption and usage from the Bangalore pilot. The UberPool service has so far been rolled out to San Francisco, New York City, Boston, Austin, and Paris. As the name suggests, it allows users to split fares with another person who happens to be requesting a ride along a similar route, by sharing a ride together.
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Following the recent car-pooling initiative by the Bangalore Traffic Police to increase the utilization of cars on the road, Uber’s carpooling service will make an attempt to make fewer cars on roads a reality. ” And who better to help Bangalore reach that goal than Uber, a company that aims to replace personal vehicle ownership altogether?”
“Since the early days of Uber in Bengaluru, we’ve been excited about the idea of providing everyone with easy access to transportation so reliable and affordable, that people can actually rethink auto ownership”.
Bhavik Rathod, GM Bengaluru, Uber said, “India is a top global priority for Uber along with China and UberPOOL”.
In July this year, the company announced that it would invest US$1 billion in India to expand operations to new cities and develop new products and payment solutions. The company will gather user data and feedback related to the service so that it can scale up the model and successfully launch the service in other cities of India.
And as has been the case with a lot of Uber’s india announcements, the company is aligning the launch of UberPOOL in Bangalore with yet another Government-backed scheme.
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Uber claims UberPOOL helps reduce pollution by encouraging people to share rides. In fact, riders taking POOL in San Francisco have also saved almost 200,000 gallons of gas.
