Flexible carpooling is

carpooling Carpooling (also car-sharing, ride-sharing and lift-sharing) is the sharing of car journeys so that more than one person travels in a car, and prevents the need for others to have to drive to a location themselves. By having more people usin ...

that is not arranged ahead of time, but instead makes use of designated meeting places. It seeks to replicate the informal " slug-lines" that form in

Washington DC ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...

Houston Houston (; ) is the List of cities in Texas by population, most populous city in Texas, the Southern United States#Major cities, most populous city in the Southern United States, the List of United States cities by population, fourth-most pop ...

, and

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

, by establishing more formal locations for travelers to form carpools without advance contact. The essence of the systems is the use of a meeting-place to form carpools, without any advance contact between the participants. For people wishing to carpool, going to a meeting place is a very low-effort method for getting into a carpool, compared with any other system that involves contacting potential riders or drivers in advance, and arranging the trip. The key is that other people are also coming to the meeting place, and there need to be sufficient people traveling from any one meeting-place to the common destination so that the waiting time to form a carpool is acceptable. The Transportation Research Board is carrying out research to determine the feasibility of 'flexible carpooling to transit stations'.Transit IDEA
/ref> Since fewer people are carpooling today than were thirty years ago, the federal government, as well as local governments and the Department of Defense, are trying to reverse the decline.
/ref> It is estimated that San Francisco saves almost 1 million gallons of gasoline and associated emissions each year because of the operation of the informal flexible carpooling system.

Implementation

From 1979 to 1980,

Marin County, California Marin County is a county located in the northwestern part of the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 census, the population was 262,231. Its county seat and largest city is San Rafael. Marin County is across ...

, implemented a flexible carpooling system using as meeting points several major intersections near bus stops.Chan, Nelson D., and Susan A. Shaheen.
RIDESHARING IN NORTH AMERICA: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
." Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting, 2011. In 2009 the Washington State Legislature set aside $400,000 for a pilot project to test meeting-place based carpooling in the SR 520 corridor of Seattle.
/ref> This will incorporate the

Avego Carma Technology Corporation is a real-time transportation technology company headquartered in Cork, Ireland. Its flagship product, Carma Carpooling, matches users with nearby commuters and enables them to share the cost of driving. Carma also ...

smartphone ridematching system. In 2010 the

Auckland Regional Transport Authority The Auckland Regional Transport Authority (ARTA) was the central co-ordinating agency for transport (especially but not only public transport) in the Auckland Region of New Zealand from 2004 to 2010. In this role, ARTA provided public transport s ...

considered a flexible carpooling proposal by Trip Convergence Ltd.

Notes and references

{{Public transport Carsharing Hitchhiking

Implementation

See also

Notes and references