The University of Aberdeen and NHS Grampian have recently established a new car-sharing scheme for their employees. The scheme, which is designed to reduce travel costs as well as congestion and pollution, can be accessed over the internet, and enables staff to share lifts to any destination.
Staff can access the scheme from home or from work at http://www.liftshare.org/subsiteentry/uniaberdeen.asp for the University or http://www.liftshare.org/subsiteentry/nhsgrampian.asp for the NHS and register their journey details for free. The system will then tell them if anyone else is going in the same direction, leaving it up to them to make contact through a secure email connection, and arrange to share both the journey and the costs of travel.
As well as reducing travel costs, the scheme has been designed to encourage more efficient use of the car, thereby reducing congestion and pollution in the local area.
The software behind the system has been provided by the specialist car-sharing company, liftshare, which has established more than 200 car-sharing schemes for communities across the UK.
liftshare now has over 1 million journeys and nearly 40,000 members registered on one central database. This means that each user can choose whether to look for lifts within their own community, or from the whole liftshare database, thereby increasing the likelihood that they will find a match to their journey requirements.
Robert Murray, Director of Estates Operations welcomed the scheme, saying: "This new initiative will allow staff who are able to participate to at least half their daily travel costs and also reduce their car mileage. It is also consistent with the overall aims of providing more environmentally friendly travel alternatives which will help to reduce traffic congestion."