This graph in the Wall Street Journal yesterday summed up what I have been suspecting for a long while:
That CARPOOLING was a dead business to start with and would never take off.
First, let me first narrate a personal story:
About 6 years ago, much to the INSISTENCE of my wife, I agreed (for the first time in my life) to let my daughter travel in a school carpool from Peddar Road to J.B Petit at Colaba.
I asked my wife who the ‘pooler’ was and she mentioned a respectable family who lived on Peddar Road (Mumbai), whom we had known for a while. She said, “Alok, stop being paranoid. They are ‘like us'”.
Well, we got to know soon enough 🙁
One day, my daughter came home looking shaken up. When my wife asked her the issue, she said, “Mom, the maid had a fight with the driver in my friend’s car. The driver got mad; the maid got off the car in the middle of the road and then we were alone with this really crazy driver…”
I SCREAMED and shouted and asked my wife to call the person and yell at them. She DID NOT. She just called and told them that the arrangement was OFF.
Carpool gaya ‘Tel Lene’.
Since then and even now, a lot of entrepreneurs developed carpooling business models, apps, ideas etc. I never understood that model either because:
– Who wants to sit in a car with strangers (or molestors) or drunks or fellows with bad body odour?
– How can I sit and make calls when I am in car with people who I will be traveling with all the time?
– How do I co-ordinate travel plans? What if I am 10 minutes late? What happens if I wanna go home early from work?
I think the Wall Street Journal speaks not just of the USA but of India too.
The car was the best bubble invented by man. Can we please not make people intrude in it?
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