Survey of carpool services

From Crash at Mine Wiki

• Ecolane - Demand-responsive transportation software. Geared towards corporate and other larger clients, this is an excellent example of using software to optimize transportation efficiency. While Ecolane's super-connected and super-automated approach is too far for CS to reach at this time, it presents an approach CS can begin striving to achieve in the future.

• Alternet Rides - Friendly but kind-of janky rideshare site; can organize rideshares around events.

• SpaceShare - Green travel and rideshare for conferences and festivals. A terrific example of ridesharing organized around events. Their buzzword: "environmental networking."

• Craigslist - Don't know what needs to be said on this one.

• hitchhikers.org - Web portal on which drivers with empty spaces in their cars can add a ride and passengers can search for rides. All over the world. Use the small tab in the upper right of page to select which world region you wish to ride in

• Nuride - A company selling car pooling management to companies and local government. Check the video

• digihitch

• pass-europe.eu (same as rodaride.eu: shares information in RSS as rides.xml. The licence of the published information is Creative Commons By-Attribution Share-Alike. Very reasonable and well written terms of use.

[edit] Germany

Ridesharing is very popular in Germany, especially for young people.

• The predominant site for carpooling is mitfahrgelegenheit.de (founded 2001), independent, mainly for Germany but occasionally with rides to/from the rest of Europe, but usually between Germany and any other country.

there is no fee for the arrangement but you have to pay the driver. For security or reliability issues: nothing will happen if somebody (driver or "guest") changes his mind 5 minutes before the ride which can be pretty disappointing if a ride is cancelled 5 minutes before. they have no security checking or rating system for the members.

• At Mitfahrzentrale you can send emails via the web-site but have to pay something (like $2) to see the phone number of the driver.

[edit] France

• In French the term covoiturage is used. Ridesharing is very common in France. Look on bulletin boards or covoiturage.com which has tons of offers and requests daily.

[edit] Belgium

• In Belgium there are quite a few Park & Ride zones. Taxistop has always been providing a ridesharing 'network' (in the old days through the radio, now online as well) where people could offer a ride or search one.

The system is based on paying a fee per distance travelled.