Move over online dating sites, there’s a new player looking to make love connections between near strangers, albeit inadvertently. While the Uber app has been hooking up passengers with drivers for a while, the company is now apparently facilitating romance via its carpooling-like UberPool service.
The New York Post reports that UberPool, the service that lets travelers share a car other UberX riders traveling in similar directions, is becoming a dating app of sorts for single New Yorkers who aren’t afraid of hopping in a car with strangers.
Unlike other ride-sharing options – such as the taxi stand at the airport – users of UberPool don’t have to waste time figuring out where potential co-passengers are going or how much they’ll pay. All of those details are sorted out via the Uber app, leaving more time for riders to get to know each other.
And for one Manhattan lawyer, the service has given his dating life a bump, telling the Post that the service provides a great setting for a spontaneous blind date.
Back in September, he says he struck up a comfortable conversation with a woman who actually lived close to him. The night ended with a number exchange.
Another New Yorker says he shared a cab to La Guardia recently with a potential suitor.
“I’ve found a lot of things in the back of an Uber… but I never thought I’d find love in the back of an Uber,” he says.
UberPool is NYC’s best new blind date spot [New York Post]
by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist