My sister makes most of her travels in France using carpooling system because it is practical, cheaper than the train, the bus or the plane and thereby she shares the travel GHG emissions and costs. What is carpooling and how it works? How can you find it in Greece?

The carpooling is basically a system where someone who travels by car alone towards a specific direction, informs the web based portal about his travel. If another person needs to travel to the same or nearly the same direction he may declare his interest and with a very small financial participation, they can end up doing the voyage together. The platform can be used by drivers who want to share the trip with others, or one can inform the destination where he wants to go in order to find the best driver. The carpooling has many benefits: first, the users of carpooling share travelling costs, this means you will difficultly find a cheaper way because if one travels alone, he would have paid 100% of costs. As mentioned above, carpooling allows users to reduce their GHG emissions since it reduces the number of cars on the roads and it is one of the most innovative ways of dealing with traffic problems. When the economical stability is challenged and there are a lot of strikes, many foreign companies are implementing carpooling to facilitate their employees to come at work and others have integrated it in their environmental policy, such as some public bodies in France. According to the Agency for Environment and Energy Management in France most organizations implementing carpooling are the businesses 43 % and more than 3 million people use such a service every year in the hexagon.

In Greece, although I was looking for a long time the existence of such a service, I finally found it, with difficulty, but I did. This amazing service exists in Greece since 2006 and can be found on the website http://www.carpooling.gr. The “carpooling.gr” proposes service not only to individuals but also to companies (incorporating such a service the company indicates its intention to reduce its footprint and also, in a city like Athens it is the perfect way to deal with the strikes, traffic and GHG emissions). There is also a special service for events, helping participants to find friends to go to a concert or exhibition. Carpooling.gr was created by a group of students in 2004 and the second edition came out in the internet in 2013. The carpooling or more specifically the idea of “auto stop web center” first appeared in Germany in the late 1990s. Since then it has been developed in most countries of Europe. The reductions of global fuel stocks, the increase of fuel price and of our transports favor the creation and the use of such innovative services.

The carpooling .gr is a web portal that connects travelers of all Greece, what else do you expect, you can go wherever you want in Greece, you can suggest to your employees a cheaper way to make their travel and in parallel through a more green way. I just hope that businesses will understand the advantage of such programs and will be used more and more. I have been struggling for years to implement such a service in a place I worked, but no reaction, why? Is it a lack of organization? Lack of environmental awareness or simply indifference?

Sources:

Agency for Environment and Energy Management in France

http://ecocitoyens.ademe.fr/mes-deplacements/se-deplacer-responsable/la-voiture-a-plusieurs

Carpooling greek website www.carpooling.gr