Car ownership has always seemed a rather pointless endeavor in an urban environment where public transport offers much better alternatives that don’t involve the high fixed costs of car ownership or the faff of finding parking spaces and all that for your machine.

With the rise in sharing economy platforms that allow you to rent a car, or indeed rent a driven car, easily and efficiently, the logic seems even less stacked in favor of ownership.

Putting aside the ownership of the vehicle however, there have been a number of projects attempting to get us from A to B more effectively.

I wrote about the Finnish venture Kutsuplus a few years ago for instance.  Kutsuplus is the Finnish capitals mass transit hybrid system, and it has innovated by letting riders both choose their own routes AND summon their own buses.

Here’s how it works.  You access the official Kutsuplus app on your phone, from which you can summon a Kutsuplus bus to your stop (within a 10 minute lead time).  The bus that arrives will seat at least nine people and comes with space for baby carriages and bicycles.

Or you have the Israeli project Ototo, which crowdsources real-time travel information from passengers with the aim of providing users with more intelligent suggestions for their commute.

Boston based Bridj are taking a different tact and assuming that the commute will be lengthy.  They operate a shuttle service that hope to offer commuters a more enlightening way to get to work.  As with most things these days, the service is driven via a mobile app, through which users can select their desired pick up and destination points, their time of travel and to reserve a seat on the bus.

Introducing Shift

Shift is a new service that is taking its own stance on the problem.  They’re an app based service that aims to give travelers access to the right vehicle for their journey within minutes.

Users plug in the trip they wish to make, and the app uses its algorithm to figure out the best form of transport for the job.  Once the vehicle has been selected, the user picks it up from the various Shift stations in that city (or alternatively it can be driven out to the user).

The service operates via a membership scheme whereby users have access to various kinds of vehicle depending on their membership level.  For instance, $25 a month gets you access to Shift’s fleet of bicycles.

It’s estimated that a car costs around $800, so the economics of using Shift are fairly attractive.  Do they offer a viable alternative to the plethora of other services in this space?  Time will tell.

The service is currently being piloted in Las Vegas, with the hope being that a second city will come online some time in the next few months.