Carpooling may conjure images of little league baseball games and minivans, but a new innovative website is on a quest to connect travelers, the eco-conscious, and the car-less together. Carpooling.com, the Europe-based brainchild of co-founders Michael Reinicke, Matthias Siedler, and Stefan Weber, is an online rideshare site where users—whether offering a ride or in need of one—can post carpooling schedules online. With over 3.4 million registered users and 2 million unique visitors per month, carpooling.com is a low-cost, tangible alternative to European public transportation. An added plus? The website connects 45 countries, and has led to thousands of new friendships (not to mention ten weddings!).
“The convenience and privacy of a car is always attractive versus public transport, but the cost can sometimes be prohibitive,” said Weber in an interview with Organic Connections magazine. “Carpooling can reduce transport costs by up to 75 percent, which naturally makes it an affordable and viable option. Since its inception, we have helped save 323 million liters [just over 85 million gallons] of fuel and prevented 630,000 tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere.”
Can the United States expect to use carpooling.com in the future? Perhaps. Rumblings of internationally expanding the site are brewing, especially with increasing concerns of pollution-induced diseases. Weber continues, “In some states, traffic congestion is very high and public transport is quite unreliable. The USA also embraces innovative ideas when they make sense.”
Read more in Organic Connections.
