Gett Together will ferry you between Withington Library and Piccadilly Station for a couple of quid… but nowhere else, you hear me?
You wait ages for a bus, then two come along at once. Unless, of course, you’re waiting on Manchester’s Oxford Road, where buses catering for an ever-growing student population fly up-and-down every few seconds.
Here, amidst the cyclists who refuse to vacate the pavement and the impenetrable street-wide walls of students, infrequent buses are the least of your problems.
Strange then (or perhaps not) that Oxford Road, home to the busiest and best catered for bus route in Europe, is soon to welcome another mode of communal transportation in the form of a carpool taxi service.
Introduced by Gett, the global on-demand transportation app, ‘Gett Together’ is a hop-on hop-off taxi-sharing service which offers to carry passengers between Withington Library and Piccadilly Station or anywhere in between… as long as they don’t deviate from the one route.
Already well established in London and New York, Gett Together will start life exclusively on Manchester’s Oxford Road before introducing new routes later in the year.
Though initially restricted, the launch could be good news for students prone to squabbling over taxi fares (we all know that one person who claims they’ve paid their fair share when they blatantly bloody well haven’t). There’s also the perk of a free trial running until the end of March (every weekday between 8am to 11am and 4pm to 7pm), meaning a short-term end to money arguments altogether.
Still, Gett will have their work cut out along Manchester’s ‘Knowledge Corridor’, with the route already dominated by the dirt-cheap Magic Bus, a favourite amongst students with fares set at just £1 per single.
Gett Together, meanwhile, charges double that at £2 per single ride. Still a cheap ride, of course, but whether the comfort of journeying in close proximity with a few strangers instead of a bus-load will warrant the extra quid is yet to be seen (After all, students need that extra quid for books and pencils and robes and definitely not beer).
And whilst the app might struggle to compete with the busy bus route, it does have some advantages over your regular taxi service. The firm uses black cabs that are permitted to travel in the designated bus lanes, meaning a faster, more economical transport link across the city.
You can give the Gett app a try for free on iOS and Android.
