'ATXrides' app debuts to help sort through Austin's ridesharing scene
When Prop 1 bit the dust in May, Uber and Lyft packed their bags.
Austinites like Chad Whitaker lost one of their favorite ways to get around.
"I think like a lot of people I was disappointed. Personally, I sold my vehicle a while ago and I've kind of used transportation or public transportation biking and then ridesharing to kind of fill that gap," Whitaker said.
But the gap quickly began to be filled. Transportation Network Company "FARE" told Fox 7 on Friday they just hit 130,000 rides, 3,500 fingerprinted drivers. Wingz -- a smaller service by design: hundreds of drivers. And Ride Austin, a non-profit ridesharing company is about to hit 10,000 rides this weekend.
"We actually have 1,500 drivers who have signed up and we have about 500 active drivers right now," said Ride Austin's Joe Deshotel.
And they've got some new digs.
"Tomorrow is actually our one month anniversary. So we're really excited to be moving into a new location...today actually," he said.
Deshotel says the new location will be an easy spot to onboard potential drivers and inspect their cars.
And about the city's fingerprinting rules...Deshotel says they're following them.
"We turned in our data to the city today for the first time. It shows that 80% of our drivers have been fingerprinted and the city's benchmark is 25% right now. So we're far ahead of that on the compliance side," he said.
At the moment, the non-profit is only serving a part of Austin but in the next couple of weeks they're expanding to the rest of the city and even slightly beyond.
So if companies like Get Me, Fare, Wingz, and Ride Austin are here to stay....
"I think the huge problem that I had and a lot of friends had is 'which service do you use?'" Whitaker said.
Well Chad Whitaker built an app that will help you out with that.
"It's going to search all of the companies here at once. And it provides an estimate between all the companies," he said.
It's called ATXrides. It weighs the price options and which company can pick you up where you need to be picked up.
"Whether you're an Austinite and especially if you're someone visiting from town. [With] ACL coming up, I think it would be really helpful for out-of-towners that are more used to just Uber and Lyft and they drove in the city and don't really who to use and who has been vetted and what's the best price," Whitaker said.
ATXrides is available for both iPhone and Android.