Partway

Getting a lift partway? Partway finds the best station for the driver to drop you at, so you can catch a train the rest of the way. It is built for the moments when one car cannot take everyone home: friends back from a trip who live in different cities, the spare seat out of a festival, a lift from the airport with someone who lives somewhere else, the uni run, the morning after a wedding, the drive back from an away day. One person drives, you ride along partway, and Partway works out exactly where to hop out. Say Alex is driving from Reading to Bristol, and you need to get to Cardiff. Partway checks every station along Alex's drive, looks up real trains and real ticket prices from each one, and weighs each stop against simply catching a train from where you are now. About ten seconds later you have your shortlist. WHAT YOU GET A shortlist, not a spreadsheet. Usually two to four stops, each with a plain label: Best balance, Fastest, Cheapest, or Easiest for Alex. Most cards show when you would hop out, which train you would catch, what the ticket costs with your railcard counted in, and what the lift saves you. Now and then your destination is close enough to the drive that the best answer is simply being taken there, and that card says so, with no train and nothing to book. If you are curious how we worked it out, the workings are one tap away, along with live departures around your drop-off time. HOW THE DRIVER PICKS Tick the stops you are happy with and send Alex one link. It opens in any browser, so Alex never has to install anything. Alex sees the places and what each detour adds, then picks one with a tap. The moment that happens your plan updates: where you are hopping out, the trains around that time, and a link to book your ticket. Alex never sees prices, and never where you are headed after the drop. Your business stays your business. A LIFT SAVES YOU MONEY, NOT TIME We measured real routes before building this. Trains out of big towns are quick and motorway traffic is not, so a lift rarely gets you there sooner. What it does get you is a cheaper ticket from a better station, and that is exactly what Partway hunts for. If you would do better just catching a train from where you started, we tell you that straight. PRICES Where we can price the journey properly, you see a bookable fare and a link to buy the ticket on the retailer's own site. Where contactless pay as you go covers the whole journey, we say so; nothing to book, just tap in. And when all we have is an estimate, we call it an estimate and it never comes with a booking link. PRIVACY There are no accounts. No email, no password, no profile of you anywhere. A search is a set of places, a time, and optionally two first names, and it deletes itself from our servers after 90 days. Driver links delete a month after the trip. Your search history stays on your phone, not with us. No ads, no trackers. THE PRACTICAL BITS Partway covers trains in Great Britain. It is free, and booking happens on the retailer's own site, so we never touch your payment details. Drive times come from OpenStreetMap contributors, trains and fares from National Rail, maps and geocoding from Mapbox. If a lift is on the table, find out where to hop out.