The first ridesharing app on the App Store launched here in December 2008. The largest public-private rideshare partnership of its time ran across Sonoma, Contra Costa, and Marin. We gave drivers their tolls back across eight Bay Area bridges. And when BART went on strike, we helped MTC move the city. Carma did not begin in a lab, it began in the Bay Area, eighteen years ago.
Neighbours and colleagues, forming carpools in real time, going the same way at commute time. Real carpools for real commutes — not short downtown hops. Convenient and flexible enough that people did it every day. Reducing congestion, reducing pollution, saving people time and money — before Uber, before Lyft. Launched on Apple's App Store in December 2008, the year the App Store opened.
Passengers paid drivers automatically, by distance travelled, settled in the app. Earnings were capped at the federal driving-reimbursement rate so drivers were sharing a cost, not running a taxi. That distinction is what made the trips legal carpools in every state and what made the matches stick day after day. The settlement engine, eighteen years on, is the same one we shipped that December.
Three screens from the carpooling app, circa 2014 — the matching surface, an in-progress trip, and the completion handoff. Every transaction settled in-app, by distance, between two strangers who had just shared a ride to work.
Selected coverage from the launch era (2008–2010) and the July 2013 BART strike — when MTC enlisted Carma four days before the strike began to transport up to 200,000 stranded commuters.
Carma partnered with the UC Berkeley Transportation Sustainability Research Center on a peer-reviewed study of casual carpooling in the Bay Area — among the most comprehensive examinations of real-world ridesharing behaviour ever published.
ITS America Smart Solution Spotlight Award · April 2010. Awarded to Avego (Carma's predecessor) for the real-time ridesharing platform underneath the Bay Area community.
In 2012, the Sonoma County Transportation Authority, Contra Costa Transportation Authority, and Transportation Authority of Marin won a $1.5 million CMAQ grant from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission to deploy real-time ridesharing at regional scale. Avego won the open technology RFP. The program ran 2012–2014 and became the basis for everything that followed.
The world's largest public-private partnership designed to reduce emissions and single-occupancy vehicle travel.
3-County Bay Area program
When the Bay Area Rapid Transit system went on strike in July 2013, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission picked up the phone. As many as 200,000 stranded transit riders would need to get to work. The MTC asked if Carma could help. The team had four days. What happened next put real-time ridesharing on national television.
The Bay Area has eight tolled bridges, and California's bridge-toll policy refunds the toll to verified carpools. Most carpoolers never collected. The Carma app verified the carpool at the moment of crossing and returned the toll to the user automatically, with a small in-app badge that said exactly that. You got your toll back. The same software that today returns an HOV discount to a Dallas driver, returned the bridge toll to a Bay Area commuter in 2014.
Eight bridges. Eight badges. One verified-carpool engine. The Bay Area's toll-return programme is where the architecture of "you carpooled, here is your money" was first built and shipped. It is the same verification that today, at much larger scale, drives the DFW TEXpress HOV discount.
Beyond county-level deployments, Carma ran targeted employer programs across the Bay Area. Large employers — including Agilent in the North Bay — used Carma to match employees into carpools for their daily commute, with verified ride-sharing logged and incentivized. These employer pilots became the design pattern that, years later, became the Toyota Plano deployment and the basis for the new enterprise channel.
Worked with Agilent and other major North Bay employers to match employees into reliable, verified daily carpools. Carma ran the matching; the program ran on the ground through dense on-campus outreach — ride-to-lunch events, lobby tabling, manager briefings — building the daily-commute habit one employee at a time.
Real-time ridesharing live across the Bishop Ranch business park — neighbours and colleagues carpooling to and from the campus, matched in the app, settled by distance. The program later expanded into a dedicated fleet of orange Mazda CX-5 ride-or-drive vehicles stationed on-site that any enrolled commuter could book as the driver or the passenger. The same pattern shipped two years later as the Toyota Plano deployment.
A dedicated fleet of Carma-branded Mazda CX-5s stationed at Bishop Ranch's transit centre. Any enrolled commuter could book one as the driver, picking up a colleague on the way in, or as a passenger when someone else was driving. Verified end-to-end by the app, settled in-app.
Carma no longer offers public real-time ride-matching. The Bay Area is, today, the foundation under everything else we run. The matching engine became the verification layer. The "you got your toll back" badge became the HOV discount on the TEXpress lanes in Dallas–Fort Worth. The employer pilots became the Toyota deployment. The MTC partnership became the regulatory pattern under SBCTA's VMT Mitigation Bank. Every program we run today traces back to a verified shared trip on a Bay Area road.
