Ask anyone in Quebec about carpooling and they'll describe an intercity trip. Montreal to Quebec City. Montreal to Sherbrooke. Poparide has grown to roughly two million users on those routes. Amigo Express, born in Montreal, has been connecting intercity drivers and passengers for two decades. For long trips planned days in advance, carpooling in Quebec is a solved problem.
The daily commute is a different story. If you want to carpool to work in Montreal — the same bridge, the same highway, five days a week — there has never been a service that stuck. Not because nobody tried. Because everybody who tried ran into the same wall.
The company that tried hardest
Netlift was the Montreal answer to home-to-work carpooling. Founded in 2012, it did almost everything right on paper: it matched commuters heading the same way, integrated with transit and park-and-ride lots, and focused squarely on the daily trip that intercity platforms ignored. For years, if you searched for a commute carpool app in Montreal, Netlift was the answer.
Then 2020 happened. As La Presse reported in 2021, Netlift lost 95% of its revenue when offices emptied, and the company reinvented itself as a B2B mobility platform sold to employers. The pandemic pulled the trigger, but a consumer product that collapses that completely was already running on thin margins of habit. When Netlift exited the consumer market, nobody moved in to replace it. The daily-commute niche in Montreal has been vacant ever since.
The demand didn't disappear. It moved to Facebook.
Here's the part that should puzzle you: people still want this. The Facebook group "Covoiturage partout au Québec" counts more than 74,000 members. Every day, people post the same requests — a lift from the South Shore, a regular ride to a job in Ville Saint-Laurent, a seat across a bridge at 7 a.m.
And every one of those arrangements happens with zero infrastructure. No identity verification, no payment protection, no way to know who's actually behind the profile picture, no recourse if a driver simply doesn't show up. Tens of thousands of people are telling us the demand for everyday carpooling is real — and the market is serving them with the least safe tool imaginable: a comment thread and an e-transfer to a stranger.
Even the government thinks it should work
In May 2023, the ARTM — Greater Montreal's transit authority — launched Covoiturage ARTM, a free carpooling app built to ease the La Fontaine tunnel closures. It pays drivers between $0.34 and $0.54 per kilometre, and a typical Longueuil-to-downtown passenger pays about $1.09 per trip.
That's a public agency putting real money behind the idea that commute carpooling reduces congestion. It's validation of the model at the institutional level. But a pilot built for a construction project, with little consumer marketing behind it, was never going to become the default way Montrealers get to work. Most commuters don't know it exists. Validation without reach changes nothing on the bridge at rush hour.
So why does it keep failing?
Strip away the individual stories and four structural problems show up every time.
Scheduling friction. Every platform inherited the intercity playbook: post a trip in advance, wait for a match. But commutes aren't planned days ahead. You leave at 7:40 one day and 8:15 the next, you stay late on Thursday, you work from home on Friday. A model built on fixed, pre-declared trips fights the basic texture of a workweek.
Coordination overhead. Messaging back and forth, negotiating a pickup corner, agreeing on a price — that overhead is acceptable once for a two-hour trip to Quebec City. Repeated every single morning for a 25-minute commute, it costs more effort than driving alone. The trip is short; the coordination isn't.
The chicken-and-egg density problem. An intercity platform can aggregate a whole week of demand onto one corridor and one listing page. A commute match needs someone going your way, at your time, today. That requires far more simultaneous users per corridor — and without matches, users leave before the density ever builds.
The wrong trip model. Underneath it all, every failed attempt treated a commute like a small intercity trip: an event to schedule. But a commute isn't an event. It's a flow — a route the driver was going to drive anyway, whether or not anyone else is in the car. Any system that asks drivers to plan around passengers has already lost them.
What would have to change
Follow the four failures backwards and the requirements write themselves. Matching would have to happen in real time, when the driver is actually leaving — not through listings posted in advance. The price would have to be fixed and simple, so there's nothing to negotiate before every trip. And passengers would have to ride along routes drivers were already taking, so carpooling costs the driver a few minutes, not a plan.
None of the platforms that failed did all three. That's not an accident — real-time route matching is a harder technical problem than a bulletin board. But it's the difference between carpooling as an occasional intercity event and carpooling as a daily habit.
That's the bet we're making with Rydze: real-time matching along routes drivers already drive, at a flat $3.75 a ride. The demand has been visible for a decade — in Netlift's early growth, in 74,000 Facebook group members, in a government pilot. What's been missing is a product shaped like a commute.