Sharing the Ride
Island RideShare website provides a way for people to reduce their carbon footprint
Jones hooked up with software developer Sharon Clarke and they got started. They chose the domain name Island RideShare with the idea that the project might embrace more Islands down the road. The site first opened this spring as a trial.
“The first version was done to test the waters. We didn’t know if people would use it. But we got a lot of interest, so we realized it warrants spending some time to rebuilding and improve it,” says Clarke.
Thus far, all work had been done on a volunteer basis, says Jones. “We realized we needed some money so we could revamp it. We asked Catherine Bell’s office where we could get support and she suggested EcoAction. It was a very complex grant proposal, but the money came through.”
In the meantime, they kept improving the site, and although they had not been formally launched for the public, word got around. They got a letter from the Hornby Island Community Economic Enhancement Corporation (HICEEC), a community initiative dedicated to fostering a healthy, sustainable, resilient and diversified economy on that Island. HICEEC expressed interest in doing something similar. After talking, the two groups realized they were better off combining forces with the one website.
While waiting for funding to come through, the project began advertising and garnered a core of regular users. As well, inquiries started coming through from other communities—Courtenay, Campbell River, Pender Island, Victoria—by groups interested in creating something similar or getting people in their community to use the site. Funding arrived in August, allowing Clarke to start creating a new version of the website designed to work better for a wider user-base.
“The new site will be very different,” says Clarke. The most significant improvement will be a more responsive and flexible way to search for rides. “There will be searching and filtering so you can hone in on the rides from or to your own community.”
The flexibility will allow people to, for instance, offer and search for rides to a specific event. Users can single out all the rides going to, say, the event Seedy Saturday, instead of sorting through dates and times. “Events are often really doable for people, since everyone comes and goes to the same place at the same time.”
Another new feature is a log-on. “That’s so we know who is using the system. This will deter people from frivolous use. It makes it safer for users.” Each user has the option of filling in a profile, listing gender, age group, preferences around the use of fragrance, smoking and music.
Clarke says she is working to make the site as user-friendly as possible. The more people use the site, the more effective it will be, she points out. “If there are only a few rides posted, you’re not likely to find what you want. The more choice there is, the more it will work for you.”
Jones and Clarke are reasonably confident that usage will increase. They are encouraged by the increasing prevalence of ride sharing all over North America.
“It’s definitely becoming a movement,” says Clarke. A Google search of ride sharing produces a shade under 1,000,000 hits, bringing up sites for programs across the continent—including Mexico—and around the globe.
The website www.erideshare.com covers the whole continent and has had more than one million visitors since it started in 1999. Each day the site publishes how many rides it has facilitated: on a random day in November, the numbers were impressive: 28,528 daily rides and 1,309 cross-country rides.
The BC-based Jack Bell Foundation has a ride sharing website called Bell Ride Share for BC. It has 16,000 registered members and coordinates ride sharing for approximately 60 workplaces ranging from Electronic Arts to VANOC to The Capital Regional District of Victoria, as well providing a way for people to hook-up for single rides throughout BC. Bell Ride-Share also operates a fleet of over one hundred vans that provides regular rides to people for a monthly fee.
Use of this site is dramatically increasing. In June of this year, the program announced that they were receiving five times the number of registrations compared to that time in 2007. The site was signing up 150 new commuters per week, as compared with an average of 30 per week a year ago. This was mainly due to rising gas prices, but concern over global warming and the growing momentum of the ride-share movement certainly played part.
Ride-sharing to workplaces is a growing North American trend. In a recent survey of 100 companies in Chicago, more than half said they offer some type of program to ease commuting costs, as a way to attract and retain top talent. This adds up to a significant decrease in the burning of fossil fuel: the average commute in America estimated at 48 kilometres (according to a study quoted in Inc.com), with the BC estimate even higher at 63 kilometers (according to TransLink BC, the Southern Coastal BC Transport Authority).
Ride-sharing is now big enough that this year, Canada had a national ride-sharing week in October.
For the initiators and users of Island RideShare, all this is a heartening reminder that their individual actions are part of a much, much larger equation that adds up to a significant impact on our carbon footprint. For example, the Jack Bell Ride Share project estimates that last year it helped eliminate 320,000 total annual commuting trips, reducing CO2 emissions by 3,174 tonnes, according to TransLink BC.
So if global warming is making you feel gloomy and guilty, you might consider something as simple as sharing a car with someone.