Ride-Matching Service

Libby,

GoLoco at goloco.org sounds much like what you are describing.

Regards,
Jan

Jan Aceti
Aceti Associates
40 Stanton Road
Brookline, MA 02445-6839
Ph: 781-646-4593
Cell: 781-510-1215
Fax: 914-931-2038
[email protected]
www.acetiassociates.com

Libby,

The University of South Florida's Center for Urban Transportation Research has a national clearinghouse that tracks this sort of thing. Phil Winters at CUTR is a good contact. You can also join their transp-tdm list serv. There's a whole field of companies attempting to do what you've envisioned. I was just at a half-day workshop today on the very same topic. Here's a decent grand vision white paper from the workshop organizer: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jhm/SafeRide.pdf . Here's said organizer's Wiki: http://dynamicridesharing.org . There is a long, long list of failed companies and pilot projects in this market. Some safety thoughts related to hitching rides with strangers.

1. The Facebook applet ZimRide only allows ridesharing through a trusted friend network. (GoLoco is a copy of ZimRide with a semi-famous marketing team)

2. nuride has a "reputation rating" system (a bit like eBay's) whereby safe drivers who are not ax murderers and who are pleasant and who have clean cars obtain higher rankings.

3. Ken Schmier is the founder of NextBus. 30 years ago, he invented the low-tech, common-sense "Neighborhood Transit System" - a sort of Good Neighbor Transit System. Carpool drivers and riders are required to show a visually prominent neighborhood transit system license to each other. The yellow, laminated license is large enough so that drivers can easily see riders flagging them down by the roadside. The license is a police department granted license that shows that drivers and riders are in good standing as "safe" citizens, reducing the danger of assaults. Schmier's research found that hitchhiking was incredibly safe, the problem was the unfounded fear of ax murders. Horror movies don't help the perceived lack of safety. Media sensationalism doesn't help the perceived lack of safety. Recently, the town of San Geronimo implemented the neighborhood transit system scheme (and later stopped the experiment). San Geronimo is in Marin County, North of San Francisco. There is only one major arterial road, Sir Francis Drake Blvd with frequent wide shoulders. There are designated stops along the road for licensed hitchiking. This innovative service was implemented for a time, but has since been replaced by traditional shuttle service. For more details on implementation, please see: http://www.gogeronimo.org/Reg/Reg.html . While the idea was to always require licenses, the system evolved so that non-licensed people also participated in the system.

4. Culturally, Israel is a hitchhiking country. There is no military transport, so 20-something military personnel travel the country via hitchhiking. That's right, people give rides to strange men carrying live grenades and loaded automatic rifles.

5. U.C. researcher Susan Shaheen ran ridematching/carpool focus groups at UC Davis among homogenous, college-educated populations, and found that there was a large fear factor.

6. 60 miles away from UC Davis, SF Bay Bridge ad-hoc casual carpooling with a heterogeneous population proceeds with no safety checking and with years of assault-free operation.

7. In the future, GPS location-tracking cell phones can be used to verify that carpools amongst strangers end safely. It's the equivalent of having a police cruiser tail you home. (I have a patent on this, it's not part of any ridematching system yet.)

Steve