I built Rydze because I lived the problem.
Growing up in Montreal, I didn't have a car. Getting around meant figuring out which combination of metro, bus, and walking could get me where I needed to go — and how long I was willing to spend doing it. Visiting friends on the South Shore meant a long transit ride that barely ran on weekends. Getting to IKEA meant taking the metro to the end of a line, transferring to a bus, and hoping the timing worked out. Bringing anything back was out of the question.
The thing is, I wasn't stuck because rides didn't exist. Cars were everywhere. Every few minutes, someone drove right past where I needed to go — with three empty seats. They just didn't know I was there, and I had no way to reach them.
I tried carpooling services for longer trips and they worked, but only for intercity routes planned days ahead. Nothing existed for the short, everyday trips — the ones where you just need to get across town and someone is already heading that direction.
Years later, I started driving. And then I saw the other side of the problem.
The bridge
Every morning, I watched the same thing. Thousands of cars, bumper to bumper, and almost every one carrying a single person. The same roads, the same direction, the same destination neighborhoods — and every driver sitting alone. That's not a traffic problem. That's a coordination problem. The capacity is already on the road. It's just wasted.
If even 10% of those drivers picked up one person, that's thousands fewer cars. Not in theory. In math.
That's when it clicked. The reason I couldn't get around without a car and the reason traffic is choking every city are the same problem: empty seats in cars that are already going where people need to go.
The fix is obvious. The execution wasn't.
Carpooling isn't a new idea. But the way it's been done — posting a trip on a bulletin board, waiting for someone to find it, coordinating pickup times over text — that's why it never scaled for everyday trips. It works for a planned Montreal-to-Toronto drive. It doesn't work for getting across town in 20 minutes.
Rydze matches riders and drivers in real-time. A driver enters their destination — like opening any navigation app — and sees riders along their route. A rider enters where they're going and sees drivers heading that way, right now. The match happens in seconds using spatial route analysis, not manual searching.
This is fundamentally different from ride-hailing. Uber and Lyft send a car to you. That car wasn't going anywhere until you summoned it — a driver was idling in a parking lot, burning gas, waiting. That model adds cars to the road. It's convenient, but it makes traffic worse, not better. And it costs $15–30 for a short trip because you're paying for someone's undivided time.
Rydze drivers are going somewhere. They're not waiting for you. They're picking you up because you happen to be on the way. That's why the contribution is $3.75.
Why $3.75
The same price as a single transit fare in Montreal. That's deliberate.
A rider contributes what they'd pay for a bus ticket but gets a door-to-door trip. A driver receives a $3.00 contribution for each rider they pick up — three riders on a commute means $9.00 on a trip they were already making.
We made the contribution fixed on purpose. No surge. No per-kilometer calculation. No variable amounts based on time of day. The contribution is the contribution, whether it's Monday morning rush hour or Saturday afternoon. Whether your trip is 3 kilometers or 15.
Most ride platforms use dynamic pricing because it maximizes revenue. Surge pricing charges more when demand is high — which usually means charging more when people need trips the most. That's not a cost-sharing model. It's exploitation of demand. A fixed contribution means nobody pays more because they live farther from downtown or because it's raining. It also means riders always know the cost before they book, and drivers always know what they'll receive.
We also made a structural decision: promotions and subsidies never come out of what drivers receive. If we run a discount to attract riders, we absorb the cost. The driver receives $3.00 per rider, protected.
What we're not
We're not trying to replace transit. Buses and trains move thousands of people efficiently on fixed routes. That infrastructure matters. Rydze fills the gaps — the trips transit can't cover, the hours when service is limited, the places buses don't reach well. Together, transit and carpooling reduce the need to own a car.
We're not competing with Uber on convenience either. If you need a car in three minutes at 2 AM, a ride-hailing app is the right tool. Rydze is for the everyday trips where someone is already driving past you.
Where this goes
A city with fewer single-occupancy cars. Where sharing a ride is the default, not a last resort. Where the question isn’t “should I drive alone?” but “who’s heading my way?”
Every city has the same problem Montreal has. Too many cars, too many empty seats, too many people stuck without a practical way to get from A to B. The infrastructure to fix it is already on the road. It just needs to be connected.
That's what Rydze does.