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Uber enters ride-sharing market, touting cheaper rides

SINGAPORE — Uber has waded into the ride-sharing market with uberPOOL, to allow passengers taking similar routes to share rides.

Uber said uberPool will offer cheaper rides for passengers, with fares per trip up to 25 per cent less than those of uberX. Photo: Regina Marie Lee

Uber said uberPool will offer cheaper rides for passengers, with fares per trip up to 25 per cent less than those of uberX. Photo: Regina Marie Lee

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SINGAPORE — Uber has waded into the ride-sharing market with uberPOOL, to allow passengers taking similar routes to share rides. 

The service, to launch on Friday, would mean cheaper rides, with fares per trip estimated to be up to 25 per cent less than fares of uberX, typically its cheapest service.

uberPOOL will match passengers whose routes overlap, even if they have different pick up and drop-off points. Commuters may choose the service when they book an uberX car, and will be given an upfront fare. 

For example, if passenger A books a trip from Tanglin to Tuas, it will cost S$17.20 on uberPOOL, and S$22.90 or more on uberX. Passenger A has to state if he or she has a companion for the booking before the fare is calculated. If passenger B wants to hop on from Holland Village to Tuas, his or her fare will be a cost-saving of up to 25 per cent.  

The fare will not change for anyone in the car no matter how many passengers there are on the ride. Each car can take a maximum of four bookings, and each booking can have a maximum of two passengers. 

Uber said that a passenger may be inconvenienced for no more than 15 minutes, when extra passengers have to be picked up or dropped off. Drivers are trained to wait for passengers for a maximum of just two minutes, compared to five minutes with uberX rides.

Users will be notified through the app if there is an existing passenger in the car or when more passengers will be picked up along the way.

Uber said that sharing rides would also mean less congestion and less environmental pollution. Unlike other ride-sharing services in the market such as GrabHitch and Ryde, uberPOOL will rely on private-hire uberX drivers rather than on regular non-commercial drivers, who can offer just two carpooling rides a day, based on regulations. Costs for rides on GrabHitch and Ryde, launched in November and April last year respectively, are not for profit.

Uber Singapore general manager Warren Tseng said that compared to other ride-sharing services here, uberPOOL is able to match passengers in real-time and offer rides reliably, with its “tens of thousands” of uberX drivers. 

He said: “Pooling hasn’t taken off because it’s a very manual process involving scheduling and people being at the same place at the right time... Without many cars available on a very reliable basis, pooling is very difficult to pull off unless you have that scale.”

Getting people in Singapore to share rides would require a “habit change”, incentivised by cheaper fares, he added, with riders educated on good riding etiquette such as not making the driver and other passengers wait. 

Assistant Professor Terence Fan, a transport specialist at Singapore Management University, told TODAY that while not all Singaporeans would be comfortable riding in the same car with strangers, he expects more of them to grow used to the idea and become less reliant on their own personal transport.

Transport consultant Tham Chen Munn felt that there was growing readiness to share rides as owning a car becomes a less popular aspiration among younger generations.

In an update on how their ride-hailing apps are doing, Grab told TODAY that GrabHitch’s pool of drivers and the number of ride bookings on that service are both growing by more than 50 per cent every month. Ryde said that it now has more than 10,000 drivers and is doing “tens of thousands” of carpool trips each month, with this rate at growing 30 per cent each month. 

Uber driver Richard Kang, 57, said that he was excited to take on uberPOOL rides because he has seen demand on the roads. When he drives flight crew to the airport in the early mornings, he would see other crew members waiting for taxis along the way.

He expects his earnings to become more stable. Right now, he waits 15 to 20 minutes between rides, doing 20 rides for about 15 hours a day.

Mr Tseng said that drivers would earn lower rates on time and distance for uberPOOL trips compared to uberX, but its drivers would earn more overall with uberPOOL because there would be more passengers paying fares, and less idle time between paying trips.

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