SOON you may no longer need to stick out your thumb to catch a ride. Instead, you may get one by tapping your fingers on your iPhone.
Avego, based in Kinsale, Ireland (www.avego.com), is demonstrating an iPhone application intended to let drivers and prospective passengers connect and share rides.
This give-and-receive approach to car pooling should be fairly popular, especially with people who have long commutes and are looking to cut that by half...
This is a great way to reduce commuting expenses. It should resonate with anyone looking to help the environment and save money in the process.
The folks who organize the DEMOfall conference name their picks for top 10 presentations to the DEMOgods. Here's a more exclusive list: My top five.
1. Avego. This service, which uses common cell phone and computer technologies to arrange ad-hoc carpools, is perfect for a time of high gas prices, environmental concerns and poor public transit options. Not only does the system promise to make carpooling easier, it also gives drivers a financial incentive to pick up passengers because riders pay drivers a per-mile fee to defray gas costs.
Around the Web in 2008. Sites to help you score the perfect gift, the perfect ride, the perfect parking spot and more...
Taking a cab is inherently frustrating, what with the nagging suspicion you'd get there faster yourself, and the fear that your driver's curious musk might forever turn you off eating cheesesteaks. Quelling the former is Avego.
Here's another one for Stacy's list of the top 10 mobile applications launching at Demo - but this one's greener than the rest...
It's calling the service "shared transport," but to us it looks a lot like carpooling brought into the always-on Internet age.
As someone who drives in the San Francisco area, I am well aware of the wastefulness and congestion caused by single drivers clogging up three lanes of traffic.
The Avego paradigm optimizes the daily commute by consolidating riders into fewer vehicles. It’s a new way of thinking about commuting, offering more efficient transit options, lowered gas costs and environmental benefits.
- Chris Shipley, executive producer of the DEMO conferences
Peak oil presents the potential for catastrophic upheavals, but ultimately also some more hopeful possibilities: a chance to address many underlying societal problems, and the opportunity to return to simpler, healthier and more community oriented lifestyles.
Avego could represent this hope.
- Bart Anderson, co-editor of the Energy Bulletin conferences
America hasn't the time or the resources to scale up its public transportation system to meet our energy conservation needs, especially with such a distributed population. Our focus should instead be to use the existing fleet of private automobiles as mass transit.
The Avego system is an ingenious approach of shared transit enabling private individuals to become part of the transport solution to rising fuel prices and coming fuel shortages.
- Pat Murphy, executive director of Community Solutions
The most promising app I saw is the carpooling app Avego (currently in a "launch & learn state"), which is described as a "cross between carpooling, public transit, and eBay," with a user reputation/feedback mechanism included; it also would include a payment function—i.e., a way to help out with gas money—which, as one rideshare expert put it to me, "is always awkward in person.
- Tom Vanderbilt, the author of the New York Times Bestselling Book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), on Slate.com
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