Mobile Cab Sharing on New York City’s Numerous Street Corners

Maybe you too have walked out of Penn Station in midtown NYC and seen a line of taxis on 7th ave, with a larger line of people next to it, and wondered something out loud to yourself:

“Why are all these people waiting for a cab when there’re clearly 8 empty ones in front of them? They could just walk a block before the cab line and pick one up off the street. Idiots. I’m getting in a cab way before these morons are. Tourists!”

If that’s what you thought, then you’re kind of like me. So I’ll assume you’re also a web developer geek with a compulsive need to feel better than everyone else in this over-populated city, if for no other reason than your ego.

However, if you’re more like Jon McKinney, CEO of CabCorner.Com, you probably thought something else:

“There are 15 seperate groups of people waiting to get into cabs. Some of them must be headed in the same direction. Why can’t they share rides in the same cab? They’d save money, and the cabs would pollute less. This could happen all over the city, not just at Airports and transportation hubs. But how do get these people to talk to each other?”

Enter CabCorner.com, here to save your money, the environment, and provide change for mass transit you can believe in (please excuse the unwarranted cross marketing President Obama, it’s just so popular these days).

I was introduced to Jon by my friend and former boss, Jesse Sommer, who I worked with at TasteSpace.com. Jon wanted to make a web site where people in NYC can talk to each other and share cabs, and I was contracted to make it’s beta. The idea was to have people type in where they are, where they’re going, and when they want to get there. Then the website would help them find people seeking simliar cab rides, through an interface accessible on modern day mobile phones.

However, there was one concept Jon had introduced that at first took some convincing: Jon wanted to map the whole city into spots, or locations, and have CabCorner.com users travel between these spots, as oppose to the users independently setting up meeting places.

Initially, I wondered out loud(ly) about this idea. Why tell the users what to do, and where to head? Why can’t they just enter in addresses themselves, and communicate between each other where they want to go? Shouldn’t our site be a utility of communication rather than it’s own system of transit, like a bus or subway, which has predestined stops?

After much debate, I understood Jon’s vision, and the importance of having the city mapped out into spots. Here are just some of the advantages:

• This way, the user’s exact locations (where they are heading, and where they are coming from) are kept secret. By setting up predestined locations to meet and depart, CabCorner.com user’s privacy is upheld from malicious evil-doers, and/or marketing mormons.
• New York, and really any city for that matter, can be mapped into meeting locations convienent to everyone in it’s population; the goal is that there’s a universal meeting spot for a cab (livery or yellow) to pick you up at the very most 10 blocks away from you. This has already been done in a lot of places, they’re called buses. However, buses don’t cater to your individual needs the way a cab does.
• By streamlining where to meet and where to depart, we take another step away from the cab-sharing process, so users can share cabs quicker. This should prove to be crucial in getting users to access and use the site via their Mobile phones, where bandwidth, time, and thinking become precious commodities to the user.
• Should cab-sharing become more embraced by the City, there may be city sponsored meeting locations to share cabs. Our site, given it’s unique spot-driven cab sharing search engine, is already equipped to fully exploit such endeavors.

And that honestly isn’t it. There are a lot of advantages to mapping the city out. Obviously there are challenges, one of which is simply mapping the entire city out; thus far we do have all of Manhattan and most of Brooklyn, but are working on mapping out the Bronx, Queens, and the rest of Brooklyn.

The “spot” location system Jon McKinney concocted was hard for me to understand because at first, to me, CabCorner.com was just a site where people can talk to each other about sharing a cab. But truly, it’s an attempt at a new system of transporation that ultimately may change the shape of the city.

Right now we have a backend, and the site “works”. But it’s pretty ugly and the front-end doesn’t empower the user the way it should. Thankfully we’ve acquired some help, and we should have a totally presentable, easy-to-use site by March. If you want to check out our beta and see what we have, feel free to check it out at http://cabCorner.com/ and PLEASE leave some feedback by either writing comments to this post, or pressing “feedback” in the header.

And stay tuned to this blog; my next post will describe how our site works for the user, and how CabCorner.com helps you save even more money by helping you combine rides & fares with those heading to different destinations than you are, and even estimate the fare you would end up splitting!