Low carbon travel…
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 by Nigel
Lowering our footprint is going to be a mixture of finding new solutions, and going back to old ones. Sometimes new tech is good. Sometimes old works just as well. There, for example, are dozens of sites trying to harness the power of the internet to help us to car-share:
National Car Share
Lift Share
My Lifts
Freewheelers<
Share-a-car
I’d be interested in hearing from anybody out there who’s used them. Are they easy to use? Does having to book in - sometimes days in advance - make life difficult? I’ve never tried it.
My friend, writer William Shaw, is going back to old-fashioned solution to the art of getting from A to B efficiently. He’s hitch-hiking. Remember that? You don’t need to arrange a ride days on the web, you just stuck out your thumb and go.
He used to hitch a lot as a student. More recently, driving back to visit his sick mother in Devon regularly last winter, he felt like having some company on the long ride, but never once came across a hitcher in all his many 200-mile drives. Hitch-hiking seems to have all but disappeared - here in the South, at least, which is a shame, because these days more and more cars seem to have only one person in them.
A lot of it’s to do with our sense of security, obviously. We trust people less these days. But to find out why hitching is all but dead in the UK, he’s going to try hitching from Land’s End to John O’Groats next week. It’s a one-person project to try and rekindle our faith in hitching - and to collect stories, which is something else he does.
It’s a long way; 875 miles. And single blokes aren’t often offered rides. If you see him looking bedraggled by the side of the road, give him a ride. Tell him Nigel sent you.
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July 12th, 2007 at 6:27 pm
You listed a few agencies including Freewheelers which made me laugh. My husband Steve and I set up Freewheelers about 15 years ago straight out of college. We sold it on as a going concern as we had felt it was before its time and it was not able to make us a living. I’d used the Canadian version and thought it was a fab idea. Our experience then which may have changed over time although I imagine not hugely, was that it worked fantastically well if you could take out as many of the hassles and niggles as possible. Our most successful time was at Glastonbury festival. We ran stalls there and because the leaving point was the same for everyone it made it simple and we matched hundreds of people (I think we even hired coaches as we had so much interest). We also lauched it through student unions but it only worked successfully on the major routes - london to Manchester, Birmingham or Bristol and back. We had a few members who were incredibly committed and flexible (I remember their names to this day!) but they were certainly a minority.
It needs major incentives as well as a huge critical mass for it to work well and the web offers that platform but it needs a lot of marketing and committment to reach that point.
I love your site and blog by the way.
We have 3 kids now so carsharing is not on our agenda except for very local stuff. Our solution to reducing our carbon footprint on car usage is to use biodisel. We are very successful running a VW polo and Sharan that run on biodisel made out of recycled chip fat. We use www.goldenfuels.co.uk, they are great.