Consumer Desk/Car-Pooling: Drivers in our congested cities may not be able to do much about traffic jams, road works and general delays caused by accidents and limited road capacity, but they could learn a lesson from other countries. Lloyd Gorman suggests an online route
Among their American and European counterparts, car-pooling and car-sharing are popular ways of commuting, fighting congestion and the rising cost of travel.
Car-pooling is not widely practised in Ireland and where it does happen it tends to be a very informal arrangement between work colleagues or friends. However, there is growing evidence of the benefits it can deliver.
Frustrated at the problems he faced on the journey to work from Kilkenny to Dublin every day, civil engineer Peter Seymour was driven to take action - in September 2000 he launched a free carpooling website, dublintraffic.ie.
The site works by allowing users to post journey and contact details on bulletin boards covering all the Dublin suburbs and outlying towns and villages within commuting distance of the city. Counties Meath, Kildare, Wicklow and Carlow where a growing number of city workers own more affordable property are also covered.
To register, all you need is the name of your town or area, the destination in Dublin, your first name and a work contact phone number or e-mail. This information is immediately posted on a bulletin board where other commuters can see who's going where and when.
The response to the website has been encouraging but car-pooling has still some way to go before it makes a real impact here, says Peter. "We have 160 people signed up to the site and an average of 700 hits a month and that's without any form of publicity or advertising.
"It's being used but not promoted and it really could do with a champion to sponsor it, either a city authority or a commercial backer, to give it greater penetration." He acts as the site's voluntary and unpaid organiser and webmaster.
While the State does not have an official policy on carpooling except to encourage it where possible, the private sector has been quicker to put it into practice. Peter Seymour was approached by a number of business parks around Dublin to set up links to the site where employees could log on to customised bulletin boards. The parks - among them Park West Business Park, Belfield/Beechill Office Parks and Central Park in Sandyford - are the first in the Republic to use the online model.
Some government departments, as well as a number of industrial and business parks in Nortyhern Ireland, have shown interest in using the dublintraffic.ie template.
"The purpose of the web-based service is to enable commuters to a business park or large facility to identify other commuters who live in their own neighbourhood, but who may work for a different company or in a different department," Peter explains.
"The web-based service removes the screens between businesses and offices and enables matches to be made between commuters with similar journeys. Being web-based, it's available to all companies in a business park - as well as in all offices and homes. It doesn't rely on being installed on individual PCs or on intranets".
As a traffic mobility management solution car-pooling alone will not eradicate congestion but it does have a valuable role to play. Peter estimates that up to 10 per cent of cars could be taken of the road if car-pooling became more commonplace. "There is no magic bullet - car-pooling might make only a marginal difference, but it should be considered as a measure to reduce congestion."