If you’re heading home past 2 am on a Saturday night in New York, it’s probably going to take you well over an hour on the the subway. With the recent MTA cuts, train routes (especially after midnight) have been reduced considerably and getting home is often a pain. Cabs are harder to come by and can get expensive.

Now a startup called Fare/Share, that officially launched today, is hoping to change all that. The mobile app connects people in the same area who want to share a cab. Using your phone’s in-built GPS system, you click to find nearby riders and check to see if anybody is headed in the same direction as you. Once you’ve agreed on the ride, you decide where to meet and off you go.

The app has a free fare calculator that tells you how much each one of you owes based on distance. And in case you’re worried about the sketchiness factor, you can pick the gender of your co-rider (ratings on riders are also available).

According to the data found by Fare/Share co-founder Peter Hanna, at least one in every four cabs in the city can be shared (apparently 69 percent of cab rides in the city feature a single rider), so the benefits of this free app are obvious.

For one, sharing offers you huge discounts and you cut down on fuel consumption and pollution. Clearly, there must be a need here, because a similar app called Weeels, that allows New Yorkers to order livery cabs electronically and share rides with other Weeels users, launched a couple of months ago.

But while we’re in complete support of getting more cars off the road, we have some hesitations. A lot of people (women especially) may not be comfortable with their co-passengers knowing where they live. Also, people (and drunken people on a Saturday night) can often get passive/aggressive about who gets off first and whether the split fare is truly fair (what if you get off last and the app assumed the total would be lower than what everyone else pitched in?).

These kinks will eventually be worked out and Fair/Share is hoping to launch the app for other cities too. We’re gonna try using it this weekend.