Waze, the Google-owned navigation service, is formerly known as FreeMap Israel.
After becoming a subsidiary of Google, it works using users' location, in order to provide turn-by-turn navigation information and user-submitted travel times and route details.
Waze that describes its app as a community-driven GPS navigation app that is free to download and use, also ran a dedicated carpooling app called Waze Carpool.
Six years after launching it to users in the U.S., Brazil and Israel, Google is shutting carpooling services.
The company cited COVID-19-related changes in commuting patterns that led to a sharp decline in carpooling.
Following that decision, Waze said it is exploring other ways to help serve its 150 million users worldwide that use its app for commuting.
“While Waze was predominantly a commuting app pre-COVID, today the proportion of errands and travel drives have surpassed commutes,” the company said in a statement. “This means we have an opportunity to find even more impactful ways to bring together a global community to share real-time insights and help each other outsmart traffic — this is what has always made Waze truly special.”
Waze Carpool was initially launched in Bay Area in San Francisco, which comprises the region in Northern California spanning the city of San Francisco and surrounding counties.
Soon, Google expanded it to all 50 states in the U.S., and also expanded it to Brazil and Waze’s country of origin, Israel.
Waze Carpool, which arranged deals between users to make a regular journey in a single vehicle, typically with each person taking turns to drive the others, was different than others in the competition, because it allows non-professional drivers to offer rides.
Its goal was to get more people to share rides, in order to reduce the number of single-occupancy vehicles on the road.
This kind of arrangement has been around for decades.
As a matter of fact, the 1970s oil crisis forced around 20% of U.S. citizens to share rides to work.
But fast forward, as the economy improves, roads become better and cars become more affordable due to the many choices consumers have, and not to mention ride-hailing apps that can make transportation readily available, carpooling has seen huge decline.
At this time around, only 9% of people carpool.
And since COVID-19, which fundamentally changed the way people work, thanks to the internet that allow people to work remotely, people that carpool decreased even further.
According to a survey by American Opportunity Survey, 35% of the respondents said that they can work from home full time, whereas 23% said that they can work from home between one and four days a week.
The change made carpooling even less relevant. And this is why Google is shutting Waze Carpool down.
"We are proud of what we accomplished through Waze Carpool, and are grateful to the Carpool community for sharing drives and working together to take cars off the road," Waze added.