Last year I was thinking: wouldn't it be great to have an app that does for daily transportation what travel sites have done for booking travel? It could incorporate car sharing, bike sharing, taxis, ride share and more. It turns out (surprise) someone has been developing it. Enter Ridescout.
Eric Jaffe writes about it in the Atlantic Cities blog:
Ultimately, Kopser says his vision for RideScout is about more than travel options. It's about helping Americans think outside the car when it comes to urban mobility. Kopser speaks of increasing transport efficiency (which he sees as a failure to recognize all travel options other than the single-occupancy vehicle) and of reducing drunk driving (which he sees as a failure to recognize these alternatives at the start of the night).
"Our communities, our cities and suburbs, we can't sustain a car-centric life going forward in this country," he says.
Ridescout is still an early-stage app, but I'm definitely interested to see it expand beyond its initial markets. Project 100 is a similar idea that is in development for Las Vegas, though it's a vertically-integrated platform. The appeal to a Ridescout-like app is that it can integrate multiple providers, and enable much wider choice for the consumer. From a business standpoint I understand the appeal of a vertically-integrated approach, but as an end-user it's nice to have many more options.
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