For students without cars on campus, traveling outside of Ithaca’s city confines can bring challenges, including expensive bus fares, inconvenient travel times and a lack of available tickets. To ease the difficulty of intercity traveling, three Cornell students — Jay Joo ’23, Aarsha Joshi ’27 and Prawira Pikanto ’23 — launched Revy, a new carpooling web application, on Oct. 31.
Joo, Revy’s main technology developer, said the application’s main objective is to provide a convenient, centralized place for passengers to find drivers at affordable prices. Revy currently only serves the Cornell community but is looking to expand to other college campuses over time.
“Bus prices used to be around $20 to $40 from Ithaca to New York City, and that has recently spiked up [to] $70 to $90 one way,” Joo said. “I think that is why right now there is especially a need for carpooling.”
Revy works similarly to Uber in that it is a two-sided marketplace. If an individual plans to drive home for the holidays and has two empty seats, they can post on the website, marking their price per passenger. Then, if another student also wants to go to the same location but does not have a car, they can request the ride, and Revy will provide the necessary logistical resources, such as chat features, for the two students to connect.
On average, the current price range is approximately $15 to $35 per passenger, and the driver determines a price they deem appropriate, according to Joshi, Revy’s head of marketing execution and growth. Therefore, if a driver has three to four passengers, they can easily make around $100 per ride.
Joshi, who is from New York City, expressed her frustration with the transportation options at Cornell — which drove her to seek out carpooling opportunities.
“I was trying to get home for fall break, and when I looked three weeks ahead, the [bus] ticket was $100. So I thought the price would go down if I waited a little,” Joshi said. “But as [the] break got closer, my only options had me arriving in New York City at midnight, which wasn’t something I wanted to do.”
Revy’s addition to the transportation scene this semester helps solidify carpooling as a competitive option for Cornellians in deciding how to travel out of Ithaca, as typically, carpooling is arranged between friends and on social media platforms. In fact, carpooling continues to grow throughout the nation — the global carpooling market is projected to reach $9.16 billion in 2027 from $3.68 billion in 2020.
Joo performed a soft launch in March 2023 to gauge interest and demand in carpooling among Cornell students prior to the team being formed.
“Last semester I built a prototype as a weekend project in three or four days, and it got a little over a hundred users,” Joo said. “That’s how I thought it was a signal that carpooling was something in demand. People were willing to use [an application] that’s so rough because the problem is so prominent.”
After the recent beta launch this semester, Joo’s analytics show that Revy currently has 100 to 150 daily active users, although Joo expects a slowdown after Thanksgiving break and a spike in usage again for winter break. The team is currently marketing Revy on three different platforms — Reddit, Instagram and QR codes on physical posters, with Reddit observing the most success with the most clicks and views.
A primary challenge for Revy right now is elevating and matching the number of drivers to the demand from potential passengers.
“A lot of our efforts right now are around acquiring drivers. So in our marketing for instance, instead of saying ‘find a carpool for your next trip,’ we said: ‘make $50 for your empty seats when driving out of town,’” Joo said.
Matt Miller ’27 agreed that making some extra cash is the most appealing part of the concept for him as a car owner at Cornell.
“I pay close to $800 to have my car on campus. And then you add gas on top of it as well as the maintenance for fixing up the car intermittently,” Miller said. “So having a handler’s fee of sorts when driving would sound really appealing to me.”
On the passenger end of the consideration, a major concern could be the safety and reliability of the ride, according to Joo. Compared to companies like Uber and OurBus, which have a more developed system for maintaining dependability and customer service when issues arise, Revy is still at the early stages and still needs to have those same measures in place.
“Taking myself out of the driver context, a question I might ask would be, ‘Is the person driving reliable?’” Miller said. “Since the drivers are all Cornell students, I don’t think safety is a really big concern. Accountability would be the main thing.”
In order to post a ride, all drivers must do is to sign in with their Cornell email address. Revy did not request a photograph of a driver’s license or other documentation confirming the driver’s ability to drive or their access to a car when a Sun reporter attempted to post an available ride.
Joshi noted that an early inspiration for Revy came from a European carpooling app called BlaBlaCar.
“With BlaBlaCar you can find rides from, for example, Germany to France. Because, in Europe, there are so many transportation options available, people are more receptive to not driving themselves,” Joshi said. “In the Northeast [U.S.], given how close everything is, there’s definitely some similarities you can find, and so there’s potential to look towards European modes of transportation.”
The team — which also includes Pikanto, Revy’s head of design — is focused on acquiring more drivers and increasing accountability through a built-in third-party payment system. Currently, drivers and passengers have to arrange payment independently from Revy. Joo said he believes that adding a financial commitment upfront could make the transactions more dependable on both ends. The effort to increase accountability will be integral to their goals moving forward for expanding Revy to other universities.
“Currently our hypothesis for our experimentation into expanding to other colleges is to find ones with similar circumstances as Cornell, such as a high percentage of people without a car, being in the middle of nowhere and having long breaks throughout the semester,” Joo said. “Cornell is one of the better places to deploy carpooling services, but there are also a lot of colleges out there that would really benefit from Revy.”
Catherine Zhu ’27 is a Sun contributor and can be reached at [email protected].