Seeking Ride Share Research Applicable to Small Communities

Hello,

I finally have the opportunity to share something that I learned while living in Europe! Concerning the following posting: We are therefore interested in best practices for promoting ridesharing/carpooling to the general public, rather than to employees of a specific company or organization. As well, I am curious about "stranger danger" as a barrier to ridesharing/carpooling. I have not come across ways to deal with this in the research, mostly, I assume, because potential carpoolers usually work at the same place and therefore have a way to "check people out." Have you checked into the systems in Europe? Between 1990 and 1991, I was living in Germany, near Fulda which is east of Frankfurt. I wanted to continue to travel whenever possible after spending 3 months in 1989 travelling with a Eurorail pass. There was no internet or email available at that time. I found that many Europeans don't have cars and never get their driver's license so the way that they get around, especially the Germans, is using a ridesharing system called Mitfahrzentrale. I used this system, for example, to get to Berlin. I met the guy with a car in Kassel, I guess I must have taken the train there. I believe that he spoke very good English and we shared the cost of gas. It was all arranged by an office that I contacted. So they made the connection and this is why it seemed safe to me. He drove me close to the center of Berlin and helped me contact the people that I was visiting plus even helped me get on the underground. Great experience! I also lived in the Netherlands for a long time, but I never heard about this system existing there. I just checked and there are a number of websites available now. I just put Mitfahrzentrale and searched. You can click on the translation version of the websites. Basically "von" is "from" and "nach" is "to". http://www.hitchhikers.de/index.htm1 http://www.mitfahrgelegenheit.de/ I guess because it is part of the culture and has been around for awhile, there are not so many concerns about stranger danger. I guess that it is safer than hitchhiking. I don't know if this helps or not?

Good luck,
Gayle Hoffman

I also used this system in Germany, and found it very interesting. Both the driver and the passenger had to provide photo ID before joining in the system. I think that they keep your details and photo to reduce stranger danger.

See www.worldcarshare.com for some related information on the topic youve described below.

Best regards,
Carlos F. Pardo

Coordinador de Proyecto GTZ -
Proyecto de Transporte Sostenible (SUTP, SUTP-LAC)
Cl 126 # 52A-28 of 404 Bogot D.C., Colombia
Tel: +57 (1) 215 7812
Mobile: +57 (3) 15 296 0662
e-mail: [email protected]
Pgina: www.sutp.org

This is not about ride sharing, but car-sharing. Just another option to consider. It is being used to reduce the number of persons driving to campus in Madison, Wisconsin. We already have a van rideshare program and a good public bus system as well as a healthy population of bike commuters. http://www.communitycar.com/

Dear colleagues,

I undertook some research on carpooling for my honours thesis several years back, exploring the usefulness of a social captial framework for understanding why people carpooled or not to my university, and how that related to environmental concerns. A paper summarising the findings can be downloaded here: www.mei.monash.edu.au/conference/Papers/Why%20people%20carpool.doc The basic message I got was that while 'stranger danger' seems like a reasonable concern, other barriers such as unpredictable schedules and the need to make multiple trips other than simply to and from work were more significant barriers. Because of the relative intractability of these other issues, in our particular circumstances, carpooling seemed like a relatively low value, high effort initiative to pursue compared to promoting other alternatives such as public transport, cycling and walking. That said, in the above paper, I do discuss some ideas we developed to try and promote carpooling targeting the 'social capital' angle. These seem to have had some modest success in the years since. The annual reports of the ANU's Environmental Management Plan which you can find online here: http://www.anu.edu.au/facilities/anugreen/admin/index.html may provide some further details of these measures.

sincerely,
Stefan Kaufman

Dear Jay and Monica,

We are developer of Carpooling program that is effectively deployed in workplaces and also far flung communities such as the one you suggest. The program is based on destination concept and the program administrator can put up destinations such as shopping mall, hospital, train station etc. The users visiting the destination can select the destination and find matches. Thereafter, they can work finer details such as fuel cost sharing, pick up and drop off points. It is our experience that initially people are hesitant in carpooling with stranger but factors of belonging to a workplace and community ease up. It is our experience (from about fifteen installation of our products in workplaces (employers), communities and universities) that success of Carpooling programs depends upon how far the program managers are willing to go. A strong carpooling manager can successfully sway the sentiment to make people join carpooling. It is so effective that one of our products i.e. TravelSmart carpooling is most popular. In this program, it Administrator who makes the matches and informs to participants. The Administrator usually 'checks out' participants and is generally acceptable to all. I hope this to be of help and would be happy to share more information, if required.

Regards
Steve Bungay

Envision IT - Specialised products & Solutions
for workplaces, environment & communities
Envision I.T. Pty Ltd - ABN 59 104 555 688
Tel: +61 3 9886 7240
Fax: +61 3 9886 7377
Mob: +61 425 732 510
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.envisionit.com.au

I lived in the San Francisco Bay area for a bit back in the late 90's and used an interesting program they have there. I don't know what it's called, but there are a number of places in the East Bay where solo drivers can pick up a couple of riders to take across the bridge into SanFran. The benefit to the driver is that they pay a reduced toll and get to use carpool lanes. I believe you need at least 3 people, so that usually means 2+ riders join a driver, which may provide some sense of safety (you're not alone with the driver). I knew lots of people who used this, and I did as well. Apparently, "stranger danger" wasn't a major barrier, at least not for the many people who chose to use this system. I had one friend who used the rides as a major networking opportunity, so there may be community-building benefits to this system as well.

One resource (on ridesharing) and one story (on carpooling) RIDESHARING The resource is a website: http://www.letsgaggle.com . The idea is to allow people in urban areas to quickly set up one-off ridesharing arrangements. About 3 years ago the founder of this business spoke at a meeting of HP's Sustainability Interest Group that I attended. I don't know how the business has done, but he certainly put a lot of work into it. My main input to him was that he should try to figure out how to make it work with mobile phones (even ones that don't have web browsing) rather than rely on a computer-based interface.

CARPOOLING

The carpooling experience was in the 80's when I was a novice environmentalist. I worked at a site in Silicon Valley with about 600 employees. I got Human Relations to give me the home addresses of everyone who worked there. I got Auto Club maps for the "commute shed" of our employees, and put a sticky dot on the map at the location of each employee's home. This was a LOT of work in the days before Mapquest. Nowadays I imagine that a bright Computer Science student could entirely automate the process by using a script to load addresses from the HR database into mapping software. The maps covered with dots were posted near the cafeteria, along with a note telling people that if they saw another dot near their home and were tired of driving solo they should let me know. When interested parties contacted me I didn't tell them the name of their "neighbor" for privacy reasons, but I would go to the neighbor and say "You know, Tim White (or whoever it was) lives a couple of blocks from you and is interested in carpooling. He comes in at 7 and leaves at 4. Do you want to try carpooling with Tim?" If I remember right, I was able to set up about 10 carpools this way. The maps were real conversation pieces. Many of our employees drove well over 50 miles (80 km.) each way every day, and I heard many comments from people who were AMAZED that so many of their fellow workers lived so close to them. I was amazed at how incredibly far away some of our employees had to live to find affordable housing. I should add that the workforce was primarily clerical and warehouse workers who had very regular work hours. I doubt that the approach would have worked as well for a white collar employee base.

Best Regards,
Bruce Karney

[email protected]
+1 650 450-0332 (mobile)
+1 650 964-3567 (home office)
+1 650 903-0954 (fax)
833 Bush St., Mountain View, CA 94041 USA

The San Francisco bay area has a carpooling program at http://rideshare.511.org/ I know someone who uses it to commute to work and loves it! They also have outreach to large employers to set up carpools. I'd check out the site (includes a variety of downloads) and consider dropping them a line.

Ilana

Ilana Gauss
SFDPH Green Programs
Specialist
Phone: (415) 252-3922
Fax: (415) 252-3910
www.sfdph.org/eh/Green.shtml
www.sfgreenbiz.org

Thanks to everyone who provided suggestions regarding ride sharing and small communities An MS Word file summary of comments received can be downloaded at http://www.cullbridge.com/Rideshare.htm

Cheers,
Jay

Jay Kassirer
President,
Cullbridge Marketing and Communications
61 Forest Hill Avenue,
Ottawa ON, Canada K2C 1P7
Tel: (613) 224-3800,
e-mail: [email protected]
Website: www.cullbridge.com