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Car pooling in Chennai - are we ready yet?

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Well, according to the latest news release the cost of a barrel of crude oil is $135 already. Petrol and Diesel prices may increase, peppering up the inflation and the cost of essential commodities. Chennai, unlike Bengaluru, has many industries ranging from automobile, information technology (IT), chemicals, leather, cement, et al, and the number of people owning cars has increased dramatically. With about 18 lakh vehicles on the roads, sure we would have a large carbon foot print. So, how to reduce this carbon footprint, and make the city clean and green to some extent? Car pooling!

The best way to start car pooling is among your colleagues. You’ll obviously know who’s coming from the same area as yours, and if you don’t, try communicating using the internal messaging medium like corporate instant messenger or mailing groups. This is basically the trust factor, and it works most of the time; a colleague would be more comfortable traveling with you (or vice versa) than traveling with a stranger interested in car pooling. This principle applies very much to women who will not take the risk of commuting with a stranger who had advertised for car pooling.

So if your car can accommodate four people (bigger cars accommodate five, but four is always comfortable!) look out for a few of your colleagues who have cars and propose this car pooling idea. There are certain factors that might come your way when making people agree to this idea, and they are ‘privacy’, and office timings. Nowadays, most IT companies propose flexible office timings so that the employees can sign in a little after rush hour or well before that, which eventually affects the time they would sign off. This difference in sign in and sign off times may not suit your times or your colleagues who might agree for car pooling.

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The solution
Try forming chat groups with people leaving at three different timings, probably 5 PM, 7 PM and 9 PM. This will give a choice to some people who came in your car in the morning to leave with some other colleague who will leave earlier than you do. The same can be applied to the start times too, however, 8 AM and 10:45 AM are the best suitable times in Chennai, from my experience for the past four years. Well, I don’t have a solution for the aforementioned privacy factor - so sad.

In my opinion, if a person is able to save Rs. 700 (average) a month on petrol costs, that amounts to fourteen liters of petrol savings per month, which is again one hundred sixty eight liters of petrol a year that adds to Rs 8400 in savings. If this is the case for one person, consider the savings in petrol when some ten thousand IT professionals follow car pooling. The savings for the country is enormous is this trend perpetuates the masses in various other cities like Bengaluru, Gurgaon, Mumbai, Thiruvananthapuram, et al.

I believe we can follow car pooling until we get cars that run on E95 petrol or other alternative fuels like water and air!

Let me know your thoughts on this topic, and if you’ve done a feasibility study in your company please share it with us over here. We’ll try to form a community interested in adopting and promoting car pooling, and to discuss various issues associated with it - not only in Chennai, but also in other cities.

Photos from: BitterScotch

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Viewing 3 Comments

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    Well, as I've mentioned in my post, the situation here is a bit different... people mostly (esp. IT guys!) work in shifts. I leave for work at 8:30 AM and return home by 7 PM, and it is hard to find someone in that time range. Even I'm a bit erratic when it comes to time..sometimes i leave by 10:30 AM and return by 9 PM. Even if the time works out (I've tried..) I can hardly find more than one for car pool.. sad, eh!
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    At my workplace (admittedly it's a far cry from Chennai - I live in Fl), five of us carpool regularly. We tried all sorts of different guidelines, and here's what we figured out works for us.

    We set a standard time and meeting place, that way communication need not be extensive. If you want to carpool that day, you show up, if not, that's OK. We only wait 5 minutes and then leave. If no one else shows up, then you just dirve yourself.

    As far as privacy, we're all professionals and we try to keep the conversation professional. Often, we just listen to the radio, and that saves everyone form awkwardness.

    On days when you need to be flexible, you can drirve yourself and not inconvenience anyone. I've kept stats over about 8 months and on average we carpool about 66% of the time. We've saved approximately $US 1045.65 in gas alone, and 3712.8 lbs of carbon. The money is definitely an incentive. For that, I can change my schedule a few times a week!
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    Just came across this website: http://www.chennaitraffic.in/carpool.htm Hmm, they should advertise the existence of such sites, and give an importance as equal as condom ads.
 

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