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| Car Pool like a rock star, this Rolls Royce featured on the cover of the Oasis 1997 album ‘Be Here Now’ in homage to The Who drummer Keith Moon, who was first to drive his Rolls into a pool, as one does. |
TRAFFIC is getting worse around the world, with many hours and much goodwill wasted every day on gridlocked roads. The cause of the problem is obvious — one person in a four-seater car, each driver taking up about 10 metres of the road. Traffic engineers say removing even one percent of the cars from traffic prevents gridlock.
Carpooling, or sharing a car and its costs, is an easy way to remove many more than cars than one percent of the traffic.
The difficulty to date has been finding someone in your suburb who goes in your direction, at the same time as you, and whose company you can at least tolerate.
But carpool apps have come of age, with over 200 carpool apps listed on Google Play to help find people who want to pool the costs and time of a ride, be it for students, sports teams or office workers.
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| A few of the over 200 carpool apps. |
Among them, Tanzania Carpooling and Zimride will catch the eye of many South Africans.
Tanzania Car Pooling is now in version 1.2.9, which allows the user to add a photo and added a Swahili translation of the original English text.
We would like to think if it works in the log jam caused by Dar es Salaam’s taxis, it will work in Msanzi.
Zimride does not have anything to do with Zimbabwe. Instead it is an app for ad hoc trips that establish driver-passenger trust by requiring passengers to create profiles that include information like musical preferences, interests, and past feedback. A driver has 24 hours to accept a request from a passenger. Once the request is accepted, PayPal bills the passenger.
An app that caught the eye of the Wheels staff is Wheels, but this app, which was funded by the Dubai government through the Expo 2020 Innovation programme, is aimed at Dubai citizens who want to share the costs of an Uber, metered taxi, or Careem ride.
The Toyota Finance Carpooling app inspired the most confidence. This app states it enables users to create a carpool in minutes, connecting colleagues with matching commutes through its route matching technology. It also simplifies any payments through digital wallets. The message on the website, howerer, is: “Toyota Carpooling service is being updated and will be available again soon.”
While potential car poolers have to see which app works best for them, Trees for Cars comes highly recommended. It was designed by a homeless man named Leo Grand, who received free coding lessons from a software engineer. Grand’s app makes ridesharing easier to decrease CO2 emissions and save the trees — hence the quirky name.
The hope is that software engineers in South Africa will follow Grand’s example and adapt a carpool app like Tanzania Car Pool or Hitch for use in local conditions.
(Published in Wheels 11 July 2019)
