Carpooling App helps counter heavy Cape Town traffic gridlocks

31 July 2017 11:12 AM

It has been firmly established that Cape Town is the most congested city in the country, according to TomTom's 2017 Traffic Index.

This is compounded by a large number of road works that are happening across the Cape.

uGoMyWay is a company that developed an app to facilitate carpooling to try to alleviate the problem.

Read: Cape Town declared the most congested city in SA - again

UGoMyWay CEO Chris Megan says that the carpooling app allows users to create or find rides and chat to make travelling arrangements.

He added that they did lots of research prior to creating the app with Massachusetts Institute of Technology to make sure the app was the best it could be.

The simple way we are going to solve congestion is putting more people into less cars. It's as simple as that. But you do need a bit of technology to do that.
— Chris Megan, UGoMyWay CEO

Currently, the app has around 2000 users and initial data indicates most people find matches with in a 10-minute distance from where they are going.

Around 40 % of users find rides within 2 minutes from where they need to be to vice versa. If more people make use of the app these numbers will improve, argues UGoMyWay.

For Megan, the best part of the app is the ability to share costs.

People at the end of the day are looking at R1 per km on their petrol costs. There may be parking costs at the other end. The idea that we could share those costs would be fantastic.
— Chris Megan, UGoMyWay CEO

Listen to the full interview below:

Written by: Annzra Denita