Carpooling with UberPool Leads to Love Connections

Uber is fast becoming the Big Apple’s hottest dating app — as single New Yorkers are using the car service’s ride-share option to meet up with strangers for some back-seat romance.

Although taxi riders were once reluctant to share a late-night cab ride with someone they didn’t know, passengers say the UberPool service offers the perfect setting for a spontaneous blind date.

“I’ve actually never met anyone at a bar, but being in a car with someone puts you in a situation to really talk to people,” said Upper East Sider Ian Sebastian Gall, 34.

The Midtown lawyer says he has gotten his share of phone numbers while sharing rides around Manhattan with available women.

While using the ride-share service one evening in September, Gall struck up a conversation with a woman who lived a block away. They chatted about sports — he made fun of her for being a Red Sox fan — and grew so comfortable together that he got her phone number.

On another ride, he convinced an engaged fellow passenger to hook him up with her friend.

Artist Joshua Hurt took an Uber to La Guardia on Friday morning and ended up meeting the man of his dreams. He plans on calling him for a date when he gets back into town later this week.

“I’ve found a lot of things in the back of an Uber and I’ve done a lot of things in the back of an Uber, but I never thought I’d find love in the back of an Uber,” said Hurt, 28, of Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.

These love connections are possible because New Yorkers are, for the first time, willing to share car rides with strangers.

Back in 2010, the Bloomberg administration experimented with taxi-sharing stands in the hopes of encouraging riders to get into cabs with strangers, saving themselves money and keeping cars off the streets. But passengers were not willing to share their space and the trial fizzled.

Uber, however, seems to have finally cracked the code. During one week in October, nearly 50,000 passengers used the UberPool service, effectively taking a car off the road for the equivalent of 60,000 miles by sharing, company officials said.

The difference is that, unlike with the ride-share stations where passengers had to sort out where they were going and who was paying what, the app does that work for them, said Josh Mohrer, Uber’s general manager in New York City.

“Riders can’t be standing around asking, ‘Are you going that way?’?” Mohrer explained.

Article Originally Posted on The New York Post