In an interview with Urban Omnibus, David Mahfouda and Alex Pasternack, the founders of social transit start-up Weeels, describe their vision for the future of urban mobility:

Urban Omnibus: What is Weeels? How does it work? David Mahfouda: Weeels allows users to order cabs with the click of a button, to and from anywhere in the city. The application maps travel routes, provides your fare in advance, and books the ride as well. We work with livery – or chauffeured – cars, which are more prevalent in areas yellow taxis don’t serve.
In addition, leveraging the potential of location-aware social networking, Weeels can pair users taking similar trips so they can share a ride. Users who are flexible about departure time can opt to wait for a match, saving money on the fare and cutting emissions by reducing the total number of car rides.
Alex Pasternack: In short, it links people and taxi cabs to create a more flexible, efficient, reliable, and affordable mode of transit. It begins to address the incredible excess capacity of New York City’s 13,000-car taxi fleet, much of which is underutilized even when engaged in fares; when not, its drivers must often troll around for rides, wasting time and energy. Starting with the premise that we need to not only improve our bike and train infrastructure, but also better use the road infrastructure and vehicles we already have, the mission is to make transit less costly, more flexible and more social. Think of it as transit-friendly rezoning, like the kind the city has been pushing, but for vehicles.

Rather than focus exclusively on investing in expensive new infrastructure, with all the environmental and economic costs that entails, Mahfouda and Pasternack propose using existing vehicles more effectively, and to encourage the collaborative consumption of mobility. Their vision of social transit goes beyond traditional public mass transit to potentially include “all kinds of unrouted vehicle transit.”

Mahfouda and Pasternack have hit upon a homegrown version of “reverse innovation.” The term, coined by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble of Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, is normally used to refer to stripped-down products designed to serve poor customers in countries like India or Brazil. While Weeels will at first serve neighborhoods with inadequate mass transit links, like the gentrifying neighborhoods bordering New York city’s Gowanus Canal, one can imagine this form of social transit eventually serving dense yet polycentric inner suburbs across the country, particularly if gasoline prices prove prohibitively expensive in the near future.