By: Aliaksei Trafimchyk

Transportation technology has transformed how Americans move within cities. Travel between cities, however, can still present a different set of challenges.

For travelers moving between regional destinations, university campuses, suburbs and major cities, the usual choices remain familiar: drive alone, coordinate informally with someone making the same trip, or rely on scheduled bus and rail services that may not always align with a traveler’s origin, destination or timing.

Shukhrat Safarov believes another transportation resource is hiding in plain sight: empty seats in cars already making those journeys.

That idea is behind iZZi Ride, the Pennsylvania-based technology company Safarov founded in 2024 to develop a marketplace for planned intercity carpooling.

Unlike conventional ride-hailing, the model does not begin by dispatching a driver after a passenger requests transportation. Instead, iZZi Ride is built around trips people already intend to make. Drivers can publish upcoming journeys and available seats, while passengers can search for compatible trips or post their own travel requests.

“We started with a very practical problem: people are already driving between cities with empty seats, while other people are trying to make the same trip,” Safarov said. “The technology should make that connection easier, safer and more useful.”

Starting With a Real Corridor

iZZi Ride has grown to more than 10,000 users and maintains a 4.8-out-of-5 rating on the App Store, with its strongest early activity developing along the Philadelphia–New York corridor. The company has initially focused on building its marketplace and understanding user behavior rather than maximizing short-term revenue.

The Northeast provides a practical environment in which to develop the model. Even in a region with extensive rail and bus networks, travelers do not necessarily begin and end their journeys at transportation terminals. Students travel home on weekends. Employees follow increasingly flexible schedules. Travelers move between suburbs, campuses, airports, and cities.

For some passengers, the challenge is not the absence of transportation altogether but the distance to a station, an inconvenient schedule, the location of a final destination, or simply the difficulty of finding an option that fits the entire journey.

Safarov does not see iZZi Ride as a replacement for trains or buses. Instead, he sees carpooling as another layer within the existing transportation system, one capable of making better use of private trips already taking place.

Learning From the Transportation Industry

That positioning became clearer this summer when iZZi Ride joined the Association for Commuter Transportation (ACT) as an organizational member, and Safarov participated in ACT’s 40th Annual International Conference in Philadelphia.

For iZZi Ride, ACT40 was less about conventional startup exposure than about testing the company’s assumptions with people already working on transportation demand management, shared mobility, employer transportation, carpooling, transit access and alternatives to single-occupancy vehicle travel.

The experience helped Safarov sharpen an important distinction. The United States already has sophisticated commuter programs, employer transportation initiatives, vanpools, local carpool programs, and regional transportation systems. But the intercity use case, particularly trips between metropolitan areas, can fall into a less consistently covered space between local commuting and scheduled intercity transit.

For a traveler, Philadelphia to New York is one journey. From a transportation-program perspective, however, that journey crosses state lines, local systems, and multiple service areas.

That has helped shape iZZi Ride’s strategy around trip-specific intercity matching rather than trying to recreate transportation programs that already exist.

The conference also led to follow-up discussions with professionals from ACT, federal transportation research, university transportation programs, and the broader TDM community about where intercity carpooling could complement existing mobility programs.

Those discussions helped move iZZi Ride’s thinking beyond a purely consumer marketplace toward a model that could also support universities, employers, and transportation-demand-management programs.

“ACT helped us understand that the opportunity is bigger than simply matching a driver and a passenger,” Safarov said. “The real question is where intercity carpooling fits into the broader transportation system and how it can complement the programs that already exist.”

Some of those discussions have already influenced the company’s product roadmap. Beyond allowing drivers to publish planned trips, iZZi Ride now enables passengers to post their own travel requests and is developing a package-delivery option that could match requests with drivers already traveling along the same route.

The company has also introduced additional trust and safety features for intercity trips, including trip-start confirmation through QR or manual verification codes and live trip-tracking links that users can share during a journey.

Universities as a Testing Ground

One of the more practical directions to emerge from Safarov’s recent transportation-industry discussions involves universities.

Campus transportation may work well for local movement, while students and employees still travel between campus and home, airports, neighboring cities, internships, and other regional destinations.

Universities also offer something particularly valuable to a shared-mobility marketplace: a defined community.

Instead of immediately asking strangers across an entire metropolitan region to trust one another, a university-focused version of iZZi Ride could limit participation to users verified through institutional credentials. The company believes that could help address two of the hardest problems in carpooling: trust and achieving enough concentrated demand to make matching useful.

Conversations with university transportation professionals also shaped the idea of a closed-community pilot in which students and employees could join through verified university email addresses, creating a more controlled environment for testing intercity carpooling within an institutional community.

The idea developed further through conversations surrounding ACT40. Safarov participated in a University of Pennsylvania transportation tour connected with the conference, while a separate discussion with Rutgers University transportation researcher Michael Smart explored potential research collaboration, student-project pathways, and the use of iZZi Ride data to study intercity ridesharing, technology adoption, and trust.

No formal university pilot has been announced. For Safarov, the immediate goal is to develop a model that an institution could realistically evaluate: a controlled community, a limited number of high-demand routes, and measurable outcomes such as ride postings, passenger requests, matches, repeat usage, and user feedback.

Photo Courtesy: iZZi Ride (Shukhrat Safarov, Founder and CEO of iZZi Ride, with Kapil Doorkapersadh from Scoop Commute, and Jeremy Zuker, CEO of Scoop Commute, at the 2026 ACT International Conference in Philadelphia.)

From User Growth to Measurable Mobility

The ACT40 experience has also influenced what Safarov wants iZZi Ride to measure.

A download or registration count can demonstrate interest in a product, but it does not necessarily explain whether the product is solving a transportation problem.

The company increasingly wants to understand which routes generate demand, how frequently passengers find compatible drivers, how many users return, how many seats are filled, and what travelers would have done if a shared ride had not been available.

That last question matters.

It would be easy for a carpooling company to assume that every shared ride removes another vehicle from the road. The reality is more complicated. A passenger might otherwise have driven, taken a train or bus, asked someone for a ride, or chosen not to travel.

Discussions with transportation and university professionals reinforced the value of measuring those choices rather than simply assuming broader effects. That has led iZZi Ride to explore research and data-driven pilots alongside consumer growth.

The underlying proposition is more straightforward: when a driver is already making an intercity journey, an available seat represents transportation capacity that already exists.

iZZi Ride is testing whether technology can organize more of that capacity.

Building Density Before Building a Map

The company is entering an established market. Other platforms already offer various forms of carpooling, ride-matching, and long-distance travel coordination.

Safarov’s strategy does not depend on claiming that a single feature of iZZi Ride is unprecedented. Instead, the company’s approach combines an intercity focus with trip-specific matching, corridor concentration, reputation and trust features, and the potential for verified institutional communities.

That also explains why Safarov is cautious about expanding everywhere at once.

A two-sided marketplace depends on density. Thousands of users scattered across the country are less useful to someone who needs a ride on Friday afternoon than a concentrated community of drivers and passengers traveling compatible routes.

For now, Philadelphia–New York remains iZZi Ride’s core corridor. The company plans to continue developing the Northeast network, with New York–Boston and New York–Washington, D.C. among potential future expansion directions.

At the same time, Safarov is continuing to engage with transportation and economic-development stakeholders. He has an upcoming meeting with representatives of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation to discuss iZZi Ride’s intercity carpooling model and how a platform of this kind could fit within the broader transportation ecosystem. The company is also engaging with local economic-development leadership in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, where iZZi Ride is based.

These discussions remain exploratory rather than formal partnerships or endorsements, but they reflect the company’s broader effort to understand how an intercity platform could interact with transportation and regional-development priorities as it grows.

Safarov’s background in economics, international finance, and entrepreneurship has shaped the way he approaches that expansion. Rather than viewing iZZi Ride as a company that needs to create transportation capacity from scratch, he sees it as a marketplace trying to organize capacity that already exists.

The next stage is therefore not simply about putting more cities on a map. It involves strengthening trust and verification, concentrating supply and demand, exploring institutional applications, and collecting better data about how travelers actually use the platform.

“The next stage for iZZi Ride is to prove the model with data: who uses it, why they choose it, what trip they would have taken otherwise, and where it creates measurable value for communities and transportation partners,” Safarov said.

For iZZi Ride, the opportunity lies in journeys that are already happening, and in determining whether better coordination can make some of the empty seats traveling with them useful to someone else.