SINGAPORE — Schoolber, a new ride-sharing service for schoolchildren, will be put to the test on the first day of school today, as it kicks off operations with about 200 parents making school runs to pick up approximately 400 other children living nearby for a fee.

The three-month-old start-up’s mobile application was launched last Monday, just in time for parent-drivers and subscribing parents to sign on the platform to formalise their pairings and negotiate rates of between S$70 and S$150 a month, based on distance and whether the rides are one or two-way. Through the app, parents will also be alerted when their children are dropped off at school or picked up after school, and can track where the children are at any point of their journey.

One such driver on the service is housewife Wendy Loh, who will fetch two other children going to the same school — Tao Nan Primary — as her two children. The passengers live no more than 500m away from her house, the 37-year-old said. For sending the children to and from school, she expects to make S$220 per month.

The mother of one of Mdm Loh’s passengers, Mrs Joanna Yang, had met Mdm Loh in advance to coordinate on pick-up points and get their children familiarised with the family.

Mrs Yang’s Primary Two son will be picked up at 6.45am, which she said gives her son an additional half an hour of sleep. A lot of time was wasted when her son used a school bus last year, said Mrs Yang. “He was the third of more than 20 children picked up for school, and third last to be dropped off after school, despite him living only 1km away,” she said.

Ms Sara Mustaffa is another parent whose two children, 9 and 11, will be catching rides from a parent who lives five minutes away. She will pay the parent-driver S$150 a month for picking them up at 7am every school day to Qihua Primary — a sum she said is “way cheaper” than school bus fees, which are typically S$110 monthly per child, regardless of the semester breaks in June and December. “It’s a win-win situation,” said the civil servant.

Over the past three weeks, the entrepreneur couple behind Schoolber, Mr Toni Teh, and his wife, Charlemagne, had been busy conducting trials, making five to six mock runs a day to test the reliability of the app’s student tracking function. Some parent-drivers also conducted mock drives to time the trips and monitor traffic conditions.

More than 8,000 parents have registered interest on the service so far, but only 800 parent-drivers have signed up. To bump up their pool of parent-drivers to at least 2,400, Schoolber explored partnerships with car rental companies such as WhizzCar and Popular Rent-A-Car to make it more affordable for parent-drivers with no vehicles to rent a car. Rates Schoolber negotiated start from about S$1,300 per month — S$300 cheaper than market prices. Schoolber will charge parent drivers 10 per cent of their earnings per month up till S$10. Parents subscribing their children on their carpooling service are also charged a yearly administration fee ranging from S$30 to S$97, depending on the services they engage.

The Singapore School Transport Association had in November raised concerns over the new entrant, suggesting that Schoolber could be a “pirate” taxi service — but Mr Teh maintained that Schoolber “an IT enabler in a sharing economy”. WONG PEI TING