RooRides creators Steve and Shaylynn McMullen with their daughter Kasey. Photo: Nikki Bailey.
A new mode of transport is coming to Esperance with the pending launch of a locally owned rideshare company, RooRides.
The service will allow drivers to use their own vehicles to transport people in Esperance and the surrounding regions, including Condingup and Gibson.
Creators Steve McMullen and Shaylynn McMullen have been developing the company for 12 months and said they were in the final stages before the official rollout.
“We have an anticipated timeline that we are working to, and we will be announcing that very soon — we’re just waiting for a few extra stars to align before we put that firm date out to the public,” Mr McMullen said.
“We already have drivers that have started the formal registration process with us and the Department of Transport and we’ve got a significant amount of interest for consumers to use the service.
“We can’t wait — we think this is really going to be a great service and connect the community.”
Mr McMullen said RooRides would fill a gap in the Esperance market, which had an absence of global rideshare services.
“I understand why Uber and Didi and the bigger players aren’t coming here — they often look at towns or cities that have a population in excess of 100,000 people,” he said.
“When it comes to smaller communities like Esperance, we quite often need to take it upon ourselves if we want these new and improved services in town.
“We’re providing a platform for drivers to come on board to provide a safe, reliable and affordable mode of transport in town via rideshare.”
Mr McMullen said it would provide an alternative to the transport systems that already existed in town.
“We have a taxi service which sometimes has significant wait times, a bus service that stops operating after 6pm and Beam scooters, which are fantastic but they’re not great in the howling southerlies and the rain and they can only take one person,” he said.
“It’s happened before where people have gone out and there’s no other option to go home except to call up your parents or friends and beg and plead for a drive or walk 5km home at night.”
RooRides has the same type of licence Uber operates under in WA and Mr McMullen said like other rideshare companies, they were using a “gig economy”.
“We’re not necessarily looking for fulltime drivers, we’re looking to get a larger number of drivers on the road and those drivers might have fulltime jobs or businesses, they might be semiretired or retired and looking to drive anywhere between five and 15 hours per week,” he said.
“We’ve got the potential to have maybe a dozen cars on the road at that time to actually meet the demand when it’s there.”
Mr McMullen said it was an opportunity for locals to earn some extra cash during the cost-of-living crisis.
He said there was potential to update and expand the rideshare map to include more areas if needed so that everybody was included.
