Ride-sharing and car-pooling application uGoMyWay has been launched in Cape Town, allowing users to safely find drivers and passengers who commute to and from the same area to share their journeys and travel costs.
Not to be confused with Nigerian equivalent GoMyWay, uGoMyWay aims to tackle congestion on the road network and plans to expand to other cities across South Africa in due course.
Developed by a small team in Cape Town, the app defines and shares routine journeys such as home-to-work within a secure ecosystem, which then ranks other users who make similar journeys according to the best match.
The app provides cell phone verification as well as a secure chat platform to help establish trust.
“The solution is that we simply want to make better use of the road network and allow technology to help people connect to each other,” said Chris Megan, co-founder of uGoMyWay.
uGoMyWay suggests a fee of ZAR1 per kilometre but the user can elect to increase or decrease this amount. This rate is then applied to the shared journey to arrive at a shared travel cost.
The startup’s ring-fence facility allows users to elect to only become visible and be seen by other members of an organisation, school, workplace or any other community. Users can utilise SnapScan to make secure payments, electing how frequently they would like to settle up.
uGoMyWay also provides a Leaderboard facility which places visibility on car pool activity at the organisation level, measuring road trips saved and the resulting reduction in CO2 emissions.
It is available for free download on Google Play for all Android users, with iPhone, web and other platforms following shortly.
