Carpooling is the sharing of a car between two or more individuals traveling in the same route. There are numerous advantages to carpooling like cost savings, reduction in fuel consumption, pollution etc. In a country like India, where the road infrastructure is never enough to support the number of vehicles on the roads, carpooling is an ideal solution. Then why do we not accept carpooling?
Many might retort that it is the Indian habit of showing off and the car being a symbol of social status that makes people less willing to carpool. Though this is partially true, these are just mind sets which can be changed with awareness. Five years back most people thought that India would never shop online and today you have websites selling diamonds and furniture online. Wasn’t this a huge change in the Indian mind set? The lesson to be learned from this is that change can be brought upon by addressing the underlying problems and through awareness. In the previous case, the underlying problem was the fear of being cheated when making online transactions which has been addressed successfully through safety precautions in online banking. The awareness aspect was taken care by massive promotional campaigns by e-commerce websites in both print and digital media.
Coming back to the topic, I would say carpooling CAN click in India provided the underlying problems are successfully addressed. I would say there are two major problems in India for carpooling. One is the fear of safety and the other is lack of flexibility in timing.
Understanding these issues, my colleague and I have come up with a solution which addresses both these problems. The solution is called rideIT. Our website (www.rideIT.in) and mobile app (coming soon) serve as an inter-company carpool matching service exclusively for working professionals. By limiting registration to employees of major companies, we have created a platform where one can feel safe to share rides. This takes care of safety but what about flexibility?
rideIT facilitates two kinds of carpools – Regular Carpool (daily carpool) and Casual Carpool (one-time ride). This way, users can find a Regular Carpool for daily travel to office and whenever their regular ride is not available, they can search for a Casual Carpool back home.
We had a pilot launch last year in Hyderabad in 24 companies and plan to soon open up to all major companies. This way, we are trying to inculcate the habit of carpooling among India’s working professionals with the aim of creating a sustainable transport system…… Do wish us luck and STW
If you have any comments or suggestions, please reply to this post or feel free to write to me at jacob.rahul@gmail.com
Twitter: @rahul_jacob
asha chaudhry
rahul,
quick reactions as i read your post – which cities do you operate in?
i like the idea of a regular carpool and a casual carpool.
if you could add a couple of screenshots of your site and embed your video on this post itself it would give us all a better idea how rideIT operates.
(you can edit your post!)
asha chaudhry
ps: if you use our search engine – you will find all other rodinhooders who are into ridesharing ventures across cities…
Rahul M Jacob
Tnx Asha,
We had a pilot launch in Hyderabad in 24 IT companies last year and plan to open up to all major companies soon!
Darshan Bhambiru
Just Start from Here and you should surely meet a lot on the Pooling side.
Do watch the Rear mirrors!
Wishing you Good Luck Rahul!!
Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal
🙂
Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal
Has it worked anywhere in the world?
E-Com solved a problem.
In the EU, the solution moved towards cycling, using green cars or ready to rent cars etc that became https://www.zipcar.com/
Why are you creating what hasn’t worked?
Rahul M Jacob
Hi Alok,
You have raised a couple of points. Let me answer them one by one:
1) A couple of carpooling start-ups in Europe have succeeded in different countries. (BlaBlaCar recently got funded 100 million dollars for global expansion and plan to enter India in 2015. Tripda (Rocket ventures) has already started operations in Delhi) But then again these websites facilitate inter-city carpooling since the roads in Europe are very good and public transport is comparatively expensive. The Indian scenario is exactly opposite, the roads here are bad but we have a cheap & decent bus/train system connecting cities. The problem here is the amount of traffic we see in cities and the number of employees traveling alone to office in their cars or bikes. Our aim is to fill up the empty seats in these vehicles with colleagues traveling in the same route.
2) E-Com didn’t really solve a problem as much as increasing the convenience of shopping. 5 years back people were apprehensive about this way of shopping but thanks to the innovations and marketing strategies of the big E-Com ventures, it has become common in the country. The lesson to be learned from here is that it is not only a problem that needs solving but also the way one markets it to the public. The general Indian population is not very open to new things and that is why E-Com ventures had to spend a big chunk of their capital in advertising to teach the public. I believe that India’s working professionals are little more open to trying out new things as long as one can communicate the advantages to them. Carpooling is a sustainable solution for our traffic and pollution problems and we are trying to communicate the fact that if working professionals start sharing their rides with others, they can make a positive change at least around their office area.
3) EU never ‘moved’ towards cycling. It has always been a popular sport there and people in general see it as a fun and easy way to move around. IMO Zipcar never really did much benefit to the environment but was just their marketing strategy to portray as a green business. Their idea was to get people to not buy cars and instead use a Zipcar whenever they travel. This got them some initial hype but fact is it was being used mostly when a person traveled to a new city without his/her own car. It didn’t really stop people from owning personal vehicles. Uber on the other hand has comparatively done better in achieving this goal which has also effected the Zipcar business model.
4) We are trying to achieve what others have tried before, but we are doing it with new innovative features and a different marketing strategy. We hope to be the Flipkart of Carpooling (without the need for regular fundraising :P)