Thursday, June 19, 2008

Carpooling takes off in Hyderabad

Parents of school children in the city are now going for carpooling to reduce the expenses of trips to the school and back.

The sharp rise in fuel prices has prompted them to use one car to ship a group of children in a locality to school rather than use individual vehicles.

This eases the pressure on their pockets. If the trend catches on, it will also decongest the city roads and reduce pollution.

A high ranking official in the Chief Minister’s Office said he had asked his son to get details of classmates who travel along the same route.

“We spoke to their parents and started using a single car instead of several to drop children to school and bring them back,” said the CMO official.

The group of five students now travels from Banjara Hills to Geetanjali Public School at Begumpet in a single car.

The parents are not sharing money but have adopted a rotation system whereby each one uses his or her car as per convenience.

The usual practice of parents is to drop their children to school in their own cars. This causes daily traffic snarls at Secunderabad, Begumpet, Abids, Narayanaguda, Mehdipatnam, Jubilee Hills, Banjara Hills, Ameerpet, S R Nagar and other prime localities in the city.

Vehicles have to inch for ward, losing precious minutes as well as precious fuel. Carpooling is likely to reduce these problems to an extent.

A freelance technocrat, Mr B. Leela Krishna, is also designing a software which will enable every school management to create a database of the addresses of children and their mode of transport.

Route maps thus prepared will help in effective carpooling and better management.

Carpooling had so far remained confined to only major metros such as Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru, while the concept is relatively new in Chennai and Pune.

In Hyderabad, carpooling has come into vogue after the recent petrol price hike.

To begin with, office goers adopted the tactic to save money.

“Right now about 40 people have registered on our free website and started using the carpool facility,” said Channel9 Eventz head, Mr Srinivas Rahul.

1 comment:

IgnorantChevalier said...

Yeah slowly but surely Carpooling/Rideshare is picking up in India - especially in big cities like Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai...

I have designed a rideshare website for residents of Hyderabad

http://www.svasearch.com

Hopefully all the Hyderbadis will find this site useful !