Koolpool - try it!!
From Peter by email, this link to a new carpooling project.
Koolpool is a revolutionary means of facilitating car pooling in congested urban areas. It is India’s first attempt at organized car pooling. A booming economy has added a large number of vehicles to the roads but road length has remained more or less constant. The result has been the very familiar traffic snarls we face daily.Go here to register.Instead of just complaining we thought of doing something about it. Our surveys on Vehicle Occupancy Levels showed that the average occupancy of private vehicles was not coming to even 2 people per car!! So what is happening is that a lot of people are just sitting in their AC cars and taking a good 30 - 45 minutes extra to reach their destinations.
Now if some of these people were to just leave their cars behind and share it with someone else then some cars could be removed from the roads. And what if you were waiting to pool but didn’t know someone whom you could pool with? Do you go about asking everybody - are you
going my way?Koolpool uses Information Technology to bring together people who are willing to pool and are traveling in the same direction. It uses the ubiquitous SMS for matching people traveling in the same direction and wanting to pool.
We call it an interesting social experiment - it is happening for the first time - and we invite you to be a part of it.
We have a tinier version of this happening at our office. And it has shown good results, traffic-wise.
Actually, its more a necessity, with over 10,000 people working out of a single location.. and that treacherous stretch through Hosur Road…
Comment by Kishore — July 29, 2006 @ 6:36 am