Cabbie Carpool with the Click of a Button: Weeels Application Brings Brooklynites Together, to Share Cabs

For nearly all neighborhood residents, it’s tough to leave Greenpoint. We’ve got everything we could possibly want or need amidst our streets and avenues, waterfront parks and backyard bars, rooftop gardens and quaint cafes. But the real reason Greenpointers tend to hole up in the Garden Spot, venturing only to nearby Williamsburg or Long Island City, is because on so many nights and weekends we are physically unable to leave: Our buses are few and far between and our only subway train—the infamous G—is an enigma.

As development booms, ushering an influx of residents into North Brooklyn neighborhoods, the inadequacies of New York City’s public transit infrastructure become more and more apparent, leaving livery cabs and yellow taxis as one of the last viable transportation options when the weather is too harsh to walk long distances or ride a bicycle. While taking taxis can be a risky decision, especially in a politically-charged world so heavily reliant on oil and fossil fuels, Brooklynites David Mahfouda and Alex Pasternack are determined to make the practice of catching a cab as environmentally, economically and socially efficient as possible. And they have the technology to prove it.

Mahfouda and Pasternack are the creators of Weeels, a social transit application for smart phones that helps users order livery cabs at pre-negotiated prices, locate others who are traveling in the same direction and coordinate cab shares. Weeels is designed to provide users with a level of personal agency and control over their transportation experience New Yorkers have never had before, and help them save time, energy and money. The application is free to download, and at the end of this week, will be available for and compatible with all smart phones.

“We are living in a time now where the landscape is totally different than it has ever been; we have the ability to connect people in ways we never could before, through things like smartphones, and that makes the prospect of sharing resources a lot easier,” Pasternack said. “People recognize the need to do that, and have the ability to do it, and there’s clearly an opportunity for us to be sharing more things in the name of smarter, more efficient behavior, and more affordable transportation. This is the right time.”

The first version of the Weeels application was released in April of this year, exclusively for iPhone usage. Mahfouda and Pasternack have teamed up with a South Brooklyn-based livery cab company and have access to approximately 200 vehicles, which are dispatched across the five boroughs when a Weeels user orders a cab. The application asks users to enter the address of their current location and the address of their destination, and will locate other users also in search of cabs heading in the same direction, or towards the same neighborhood. The user is then given a list of options: to accept the car share, order the taxi, wait 20 minutes in the event that there is no one searching for a taxi in the area at the same time, or cancel the order altogether. When a potential cab share is located, the users—who have created a small profile for themselves—will be sent each other’s information, to review before committing to a taxi ride together. All livery cabs dispatched through Weeels offer pre-negotiated rates, in order to eliminate the all-too-familiar experience of taxi cab price gouging.

“I had an idea, that changing the way people use vehicles is changing the way people talk about vehicles. That’s the first problem I presented Alex with: creating a new vocabulary of automotive transit,” said Mahfouda, who first conceived of the idea for Weeels while riding on the Trans-Siberian railroad in 2005. “I’ve always been enamored with movement—moving things have always attracted my attention—but I started thinking seriously about transportation as an infrastructural project in four or five years ago. In the U.S., since we don’t have train infrastructure, you have to think about cars and roads, and how to optimize the infrastructure we already have. I’m not really trained to think about how to build efficient engines, but it seemed exciting and prudent to think about ways of making vehicle transit more efficient.”

Both Mahfouda and Pasternack, who met as students at Harvard University and worked on a magazine together, have experience working with media and technology—Pasternack is the editor of Motherboard.tv, an offshoot of Vice Magazine focused primarily on science and tech—but see smart phones as more of a means to make real life connections and a tool to help redefine the terms of public and private, rather than a way to enterprise or capitalize on a trend.

“We didn’t start out thinking about this as a technology start-up opportunity, but more of an issue of efficient transportation. We’re coming at this from a practical and philosophical viewpoint,” Pasternack said. “It’s interesting that there are a lot of apps out there right now that have very little social utility or connection to the real world. Oftentimes they are about playing games or chatting with friends, which has value also, but something like Weeels is more directly about how we can use the city better and move around the city more efficiently.”

The Weeels application now available is the third and latest version of the pilot application, and Mahfouda and Pasternack plan to continue testing their product, absorbing user feedback and improving the program until it is as efficient as possible. The pair also plans to work with the New York City Taxi and Limousine Service, and reach out to other related organizations for potential support.

“There is clearly a need for more and better transportation options in Greenpoint/Williamsburg, and that need is only going to grow over the next decade with an influx of inhabitants, visitors, the development of both neighborhoods,” Pasternack continued. “You’ve also got a community here that is incredibly tech-savvy, especially the young people who understand the benefits of working together and building a new kind of public transportation network when the old kinds aren’t working. This is new, but Greenpoint and Williamsburg, as old as they are as communities and neighborhoods, appreciate the new, too.”

To download the latest version of the Weeels application, visit the website at http://www.weeels.org/