Waze Carpool to Shut Down as Commutes Drop Off
The carpooling app appears to be a casualty of changing habits after the pandemic.
- Master's degree in environmental journalism
Waze and its traffic-beating services are sticking around, unlike the carpool counterpart.
Waze will begin shutting down Waze Carpool, the ride-sharing cousin of real-time traffic and navigation app Waze, in September, the company said in a statement shared with CNET on Thursday. After the pandemic upended commuting patterns, or eliminated commutes altogether, Waze is shifting its focus.
"While Waze was predominantly a commuting app pre-COVID, today the proportion of errands and travel drives have surpassed commutes," Waze said in its statement. The decline in commuting comes even as Americans are driving 5% to 15% more miles than they did before the pandemic, Waze said.
Waze Carpool expanded nationwide in 2018, less than a year and a half before COVID-19 sent workers home and curtailed driving.
Cutting Waze Carpool would allow the company to make "real-world impact by doubling down on helping cities address mobility problems such as congestion, safety, sustainability and cost," Waze said, but it didn't indicate what specifically that would look like.