Carpooling, the wood and the trees.
Carpooling is one of those universal green-loves.
I mean, people share a trip in a car, less emissions all around, a bit of social-networking going on, its an all round winner of an idea.
Since its such a good idea, there is a bunch of good people who have created carpooling websites out there on the web. You can happily spend a few days signing up to the tons of good-hearted sites out there who propose to get you in touch with the one other person on the planet who wants to go from Ennis to Tralee next Tuesday at 7 p.m.
The most common problem is that the one other person who'd like to share that trip with you is probably on a member of one of the OTHER carpooling sites. Well, in that case, you may as well be on a different planet. This is the big flaw. Each carsharing website is a walled garden. Only people registered on the same web-site will have the privilege of sharing a trip. Sounds a bit 90's doesn't it ? What could we do ?????
I guess one way ( I'm a pinko-leftie-european ) is to have the EU, or individual states run the whole thing as a public service, with one operator per country/region and so destroy the walled gardens but at some cost to the creativity that goes with free enterprise. What to do, what to do ?
The other option is blindingly simple. I mean, this is the age of the web, nay Web 2.0. Why don't these sites talk to each other ? Why don't they open their databases to that a driver on site A can propose to share a trip with someone on site B ? You see whats killing all current initiatives is the lack of critical mass. Carpooling systems work best when there's enough people on board offering to share trips. But when the people who'd like to share trips are spread between so many web-sites, none of the web-sites gain the traction and they all plod along, if even.
If the sites talked to each other, the way bittorrent sites do, or hell, e-mail providers do, then you can be sure that if you don't get a match for a particular trip, its only because no-one else wants to go there right now
And who wins ? Well, Joe Public for one, the odds of him sharing that trip have improved. The carpooling sites as well. They no longer OWN their members but whoever signs on with them is guaranteed to get the best matches for trips. This will draw more people into carpooling and the different sites can then fight it out on the extra services they can offer their members, like text alerts, snazzy web interfaces, better karma.
As an aside, if all carpool trips are aggregated this opens the possibility of Verifiable Emissions Reductions, i.e. carbon-credits, which could then be sold to provide revenue for the service providers or the trippers.
Now that that's fixed, anyone for that trip to Tralee next Tuesday ??
Irish carpooling sites