A Guide to Carpooling from the East Bay into the SF Peninsula

Edited May 2019. The solution to the commute was to find a job in Oakland. Unless your company offers transportation with WiFi, it seems it is a poor trade off.

Well, not that kind of carpooling…

Recently, my commute increased from 30 minutes to about 2 hours. As a principle I do not like wasting time in the car as it is completely lost time — can’t be with family, do work or even get on a call as I have poor service over the San Mateo bridge or the Dumbarton bridge.

So I decided to do some research into all the carpooling platforms out there. There’s a lot of them!

Chariot (Android, iOS)

Good

I found this carpooling experience to be the best. They use Ford Transit vans that look comfy inside, have convenient pickup and drop-off locations and leave on scheduled times. They also have Wi-Fi onboard which is excellent to extend your workday into the commute.

Bad

Their routes seemed to be invite-only. If your company doesn’t use it, it is unlikely you could. I found a corporate route for GoPro that was very similar to my route and I contacted Chariot to make something work but negotiations fell through.

Chariot was acquired by Ford Mobility Solutions in September 2016

Scoop (Android, iOS)

Good

I had some success with Scoop initially as there was a decent sized community. The app requires you to plan your commutes ahead of time so that drivers and riders have a good sense of what to expect. The app does a good job of reminding you before deadlines so you have rides lined up.

Bad

The matching engine wasn’t very good (I feel it is done manually). I would only be matched after the deadline and often I would get a match on Waze first. If I did get matched with Scoop, I found the flake rate to be high. Twice I had a rider cancel while parked outside their house. I also had difficulty coordinating with riders. When everything lined up, the routes picked were a detour from my normal commute causing me to spend a lot of time in traffic. This defeated the original purpose of carpooling.

I really liked the company’s focus on the environment. I wish it worked for me.

Lyft and Uber

UPDATE: Since the original article Lyft Shared and Uber Pool have entered the market with mixed results.

Good

Sometimes I can get a ride to BART for as little as $4. Sometimes it might make sense to Uber POOL all the way to your destination. But the question is if that cost makes sense.

Bad

If I’m lucky Uber POOL gets me to BART in 15 minutes, but most of the time it is the most indirect route ever and has clocked as long as 45 minutes. This does not include the 10 minute wait to be matched to a driver. And that’s still a really long ride with BART + Caltrain.

Alternate option: As a carpool driver

As a registered Uber driver I looked for folks along my commute and did not get any matches. For a rider it is incredibly cheap (~10% of the UberX fare) to use Scoop or Waze. And I guessed the market for riders wanting to pay UberX to cross the bridge was very low (it can be quite expensive).

Lyft had a carpool feature that was sort of baked into the Lyft app, but it never seemed to take off despite a big billboard advertising on 101. Ultimately the Lyft Carpool service was paused.

That didn’t last long.

MagicBus (Web)

Good

The brand marketing is excellent, it seems like a personalized door to door shuttle service with Wi-Fi. Like Chariot, but for anyone. They take commuter benefits so it can end up being very affordable

Bad

I didn’t have commuter benefits but I was desperate for shuttle-with-Wi-Fi solution that I could use. So I sponsored a route (i.e. I was willing to front the cost for the bus for an entire month) but nobody bit. It was up for 2 weeks before it expired as the route from the east bay to the peninsula just wasn’t popular enough.

Never saw it in real life.

Waze Carpool (Android, iOS)

Waze Rider (Android, iOS)

Good

The in-app experience for drivers was best in class. Drivers could do carpool directly from the Waze app, and because it was also a mapping application, the transition from pickup, to driving, to dropoff was seamless. Waze would also share location and drive estimates between rider and driver and there was never any confusion on who is supposed to be where and when. The UI for the rider app was super slim and it was a very clean experience. Overall best from the bunch. Matched routes were best in class and had the least detour in the competitive set. I was able to get a regular route with a carpool buddy.

Bad

Users had to be very reliant on notifications to do any carpool related activities as the carpool feature was hidden deep in the app.

The experience was as beautiful as their design philosophy.

Conclusion

I didn’t pick a winner because ultimately none worked for me. Even though Waze Carpool offered the best route, it was enough of a detour that any time savings from using the HOV lane were offset. I still had 4 hours of driving to do everyday. I just had a bad commute, and I changed my job.

I hope you found this information helpful. Please comment any suggestions and thoughts you may have!

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