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Share Your Next Airport Taxi With This Website

You know the drill. You touch down at the airport and claim your luggage; maybe grab some coffee, run to the restroom or make a quick phone call. But your trip’s not over quite yet. You still need to get into the city. Outside, there’s a line of people — bags in hand, tempers short — waiting for cab rides. You could get lucky and find someone who’s willing to split one if they’re going the same direction as you. It’s a tough find, though. Chances are, you end up waiting for ages.

And on it goes. A new website called Shairporter aims to fix that. It’s a basic platform that connects you with others to share taxi rides to and from New York City airports — the end goal being to save you both time and money.

“The United States is a very car-centric country,” Winston Wu, Shairporter’s founder, tells Mashable. “There’s not a lot of high-speed, direct rail between airports and cities like there are in China, Hong Kong or London. So that’s how I came up with this idea.”

Shairporter works two ways: you can either search the site for rides or post your own to share. The three major New York City metropolitan area airports — JFK, LaGuardia and Newark — can be used through the site. To begin, you log into the site through Facebook. Once you’re in, you can view what rides have been posted, either through the live stream on the home page or by searching for specific locations, times or dates. Each listing has an estimated price and trip time, as well as a brief profile and contact information of who you’ll be sharing a cab with. If you can’t find a ride that fits what you’re looking for, you can post one instead. Same concept as above: select from a drop down menu where you’ll be leaving from and arriving to, and enter the date and time. You can add an additional message to your post too, like where to meet or what to bring.

The major rule is that one of the locations, either your destination or arrival spot, must be an airport.

“There’s something, like, 70 billion one-way trips between LGA or JFK and Manhattan every year,” Wu says. “Most of the people — about two thirds, I’d guess — commute by taxi or black car individually just because everything else is pretty inconvenient.” Wu cites the recent taxi fare hikes in New York as an example of why sharing rides should be desired — especially now that the holidays are approaching, he says. In September, yellow cabs increased rates by 17%; trips between airports and the city also hiked their prices. To ride from JFK to Manhattan now, for example, costs you a $52 flat fare, not including tolls or a tip — up from its previous $45 rate.

The website is still in its infancy stage — it only launched eight weeks ago. But, Wu says, he’s already planning to release a mobile app towards the beginning of next year. “The difference is that the website is more of an ‘arrange ahead of time’ type thing, and the mobile app is going to be more real time,” he says. “If you’re at the airport, you could basically open up the app and see who’s in your terminal, who’s going to the same neighborhood — you’ll be able to arrange things very quickly.”

Additionally, he says, he plans to expand to other big cities throughout the country, starting next year.

In an additional marketing move, Shairporter is offering free cab rides to all New York City airports on November 21 as part of its “Free Fare For All” campaign. The only requirement to get a free ride is that you register with the site, he says. “Ideally, if we can get our community to arrange with each other after they buy their plane tickets, it’d be a win for everyone,” he says. “Finding a cab isn’t hard, but finding a person to share it with is. The vision here is that people will connect with one another and change how we share cabs.”

What do you think? Would you use this? If you don’t live in New York, would you want to see this come to your city? Let us know.