Our story begins on a rainy night in the Upper West Side.  It was getting late, and Pete had to begin the long trek home to the Lower East Side.   He had the same two options pretty much everyone making that trip has:  hop on the subway and hope, pray that a train came within a reasonable timeframe, or grab a cab and drop $30 to go about 7 miles.

When your only realistic options for getting home at night  involve excruciating, unknowable delays with slight chance of urine-smelling, or dropping way too much money on the equivalent of a 21st century rickshaw, you don’t really have a choice at all.  And we deserve better in New York.

It was from the frustration of knowing that probably dozens of people, if not more, were making the  same choice at that very moment that Fare/Share was born.  Pete and Jeff wondered:  if only there was a way to connect some of the folks heading to the Lower East Side from the Upper West Side right now.   Short of standing outside and asking people, though, we were amazed to find that no app existed to facilitate taxi sharing on the fly anywhere, anytime.

So we decided to build Fare/Share with the help of our brilliant friend, Aaron, who was able to crunch more than 14 million taxi ride records across 20 GBs of data to confirm our fears:  a ton of rides can be easily shared every day, but aren’t! Aaron’s analysis of the TLC GPS data (taken from a one-month sample for March 2009) revealed that at least 1 in 4 taxi rides start within a 3 block radius and end within a 10 block radius.  That means at least 25%, if not more, of all taxi rides in New York could be shared!

We quickly set out to design  a smartphone and iPhone app that would make sure that at least some of those rides get shared.  Our goals were simple:  make the app easy to use by anyone, give the user control over who they ride with, and make sure it can work anywhere, any time, for anyone.  Our mission, which ultimately morphed into our slogan, was even simpler: Make cabsharing fast, safe, simple, and social.

And we’re proud to say that Fare/Share delivers on all those counts.

First, the app is fast.  You run it, you tell it where you’re going, if there’s an active match, you confirm and you’re on your way.  If there’s no match, you put the phone back in your pocket and we let you know as soon as we’ve got someone for you.

Second, the app is safe.  You register with your phone number, and we monitor and secure records of all shared rides and matches.  If you’re a creep or a jerk, your Fareness rating will quickly decline and you would have to get an entirely new phone number to re-register.  If you’re a normal person just looking to save some cash, make life easier, and maybe meet someone cool in the process, you’re golden.

Third, the app is simple.  There are no complicated timing issues or location issues.  The GPS on your iPhone tells us where you are, you tell the app where you’re headed, and that’s it.  That’s not to say the app is dumb:  you can Tweet Your Ride, letting your followers know where you’re headed, you can see trending hotspots across New York, and you can pay your fellow rider over PayPal, without ever once reaching for your wallet or cash.

Finally, the app is social.  The app encourages reaching out and meeting people you otherwise might never meet, and doing so for a great cause: saving money, reducing emissions, and making traffic in NYC a little less miserable.

We think you’ll really like Fare/Share once you start using it, so use it often and tell your friends!