Cape Town has, in recent years, been ranked the most traffic-congested city in South Africa. To help ease the pressure on the city’s roads, a new startup based in the Mother City has launched an app solution.
uGoMyWay, not to be confused with similar service, GoMyWay from Nigeria launched in 2015, allows public or private transport users to hook up with someone from their area going more or less in the same direction as they are, cutting on travel costs and in the long run, time spent on the road as well as the number of cars on major roads.
As a user, you start off by creating a profile on the app, adding your contact details and entering a trip indicating whether you’re a driver, passenger or both, the times and days of travel, arrival and departure points.
uGoMyWay will then match you to another user with a similar commute description and you’ll be able to chat to the person within the app. Each user’s contact details will not be revealed until both parties are comfortable in doing so.
From there on, you can make travel arrangements with each other, log the trips that you’ll share and let the app automatically calculate how much the shared cost for each trip will be.
Rides can be paid for on a daily, weekly or monthly basis using the SnapScan mobile payment solution. Should you want to cancel a ride, you can do so at any time if you have not logged it on the app.
uGoMyWay acts as a shared cost collection agent for drivers and will collect all monies paid to them by passengers and after deducting a small fee (calculated as R2,50 + 7% of the total), it pays this money out via EFT into the driver’s bank account.
Once you have travelled with someone, you will be able to rate them within the app for other members of the community to see. The service is also adaptable for use by businesses and schools.
“We simply want to make better use of the road network and allow technology to help people connect to each other,” said Chris Megan who founded uGoMyWay along with Sipho Ndimande. uGoMyWay’s founders added that there are plans to launch in other South African cities in the near future.
Download uGoMyWay from Google Play and iTunes now; web users will have to wait a little bit longer for a web version that iGoMyWay’s creators say will be released “soon”.
[Source – uGoMyWay]
