Phil,

This is similar to a scheme I have been thinking about where there are fixed routes from designated stops. The riders simpoly line up at the "going to town stop" and passsing drivers know that they will drop them off at another designated stop. Bit less flexible but doesn't rely on hi-tech.

I'm actually quite impressed with your system and think you should register the trademark immediatley!

One of the hurdles is the legal restrictions on running either a taxi service or bus service which your service may fall under. You might get away with it as long as there is no formal payment beween drivers and passengers. If a passenger was to drop a handful of change on the floor and accidentally leave it there when they alighted well that might just be good fortune for the driver of course and would be very hard to police. The tax office would be interested in drivers who receive payments too so I really think you have to do this on the honour system and a cash in hand basis.

I really like the idea of rating passengers and drivers.

Great idea Phil !

I don't think you need a new device to do this though - you could build an iPhone application to do it right now (and presumably an Android one, once devices using it appear on the market).

On a related (but less ambitious) note, Tech Review has an article today on carpool web sites:

Robert Gilliland didn't think much about carpooling until gas prices got out of control. Now, he's happy to trade his motoring freedom for $120 in weekly savings.

Gilliland found one rider through the classifieds Web site Craigslist and another using the carpool-matching service eRideShare.com. Thousands of commuters like him have turned to the Internet to arrange shared rides as average gas prices hover around $4 a gallon.

Each day, Gilliland picks up Brian McKenzie near his home in Lakeland, Fla., and Mike Rogers in Seffner on his way to work. He drops off McKenzie in Tampa and Rogers in Clearwater, where Gilliland works as a construction designer. He reverses that for the commute home.

The extra stops add up to an hour in round-trip commuting, meaning he could be spending three hours a day in his Ford Taurus, but the alternative is to shell out $150 a week out of his own pocket. With carpooling, his two passengers contribute $60 a piece; he pays only half of that to factor in wear and tear on his car.

"We've become friends," Gilliland said. "It's been a good experience for me socially as well as economically."

I was thinking about this last night after reading the article.

Actually, it doesn't really need anything high-tech, and can be implemented as a sequence of fairly easy-to-organise steps.

• Step 1 We all convince our local councils to create local council flags. This is the kind of utterly pointless activity that local shire councillors love to get involved in. Their remit should be to create a unique flag which is recognisable from a distance, "reflects the unique character of the region" but is "in the flavour of the neighbouring flags".

  So Leichardt council might choose something stripy like the Italian flag, to reflect the Italian heritage in the area. Hills area might do something with orange spots (because it used to be an orange-growing area before it became suburbia). That forces councils in between to do a slightly-stripy, slightly-spotty flag.

  This will consume vast amounts of time, lots of inter-council bickering and lots of chargeable hours to graphic artists. It will also give the local papers something to write up about (and they're quite clearly short of worthwhile material to cover).

  After all the time, effort, newsprint and debates are through, everyone will know what their local flags are. Rates notices will get printed with it because the council will need to get their value for money out of the design work. It will be up at the local library, council chambers and who knows where else.

• Step 2 Print up all the flags, one to a page in laminated pockets, attached to a spiral binding. So you can flip the book around on its spine and it will show a local council flag.
• Step 3a If you are a hitch-hiker, carry the book around with you and hold it out so that any passing cars can see it. Since everyone will have seen the council flag of most locations ad nauseum, it'll be obvious what you mean and where you want to go. Even if only a few hitch-hikers do it, it still works. The system can slowly build up momentum.
• Step 3b If you are a driver, pop the book up at the appropriate flag on your windscreen, or attach it to the windscreen side of the sunshade. Again, since everyone knows the flags by this stage, it's obvious what you mean -- that you're happy to give a lift to a hitch-hiker to wherever it is that you are going. Even if only a few people do this, it still works.

  Payment is essentially the same as for buskers -- you just rely on people being appropriately generous. It's more compensation than you would have got if you hadn't given someone a lift.

• Step 4 Wait for the system to unfold until everyone is using it.

The total cost of the system is therefore only a few dollars per person (the cost of printing up a laminated book), can grow incrementally and requires no new technology to learn.

This sorts out the matching problem reasonably well, I think. The only aspect I haven't addressed is a rating system for drivers and passengers. Any low-tech solutions for that?

Phil

Good Idea, A good "disruptive" technology. When you consider public transport the model hasn't changed in at least 100 years, the last great invention was the omnibus.

On a similar vein I'd like commuter buses to change to a "group charter" model, currently a rushhour bus service maxes out at 25% capacity (start empty, fill on way to destination, returns to start empty). If however you registered on a website and the bus picked up its total load at maybe 2 points and went straight to the general destination then the utilization would double to 50% (Full one way, empty the other).

Of course the problem with all these schemes is as the utilization increases, the costs drop and you are encouraged to travel further, i.e. in the long run they are self defeating of the purpose to use less energy.

Neven

First - let me congratulate you for the great idea; I have been thinking about something like that for a long time.

A similar system has been successfully running in big cities in European countries for years: designated taxi shuttles going through fixed routes, picking up and dropping passengers on request. Besides being much simpler, this one has the advantage that a van can accommodate up to 10-12 people, while most cars can comfortably seat 2 or 3 extra passengers max. It could be greatly enhanced if passengers are given mobile devices calculating the fastest way from A to B.

In US I suspect the biggest problems with either of these schemes will not be technical, but... legal. I imagine the lawsuits if an accident happens with a taxi and the passengers get hurt. Another problem I see is that a big chunk of intown driving in US is on highway which makes stopping and picking up problematic.

Both problems are not idea killers, just something to have in mind.

Great idea!

Now, who's going to rate the drivers?

Stinky car.
Bad music.
Dangerous driving.
Pulling a gun on the passenger.

I'd think twice about climbing into a stranger's car.

Think twice about picking up strangers too. I knew a man who got killed giving a hitchhiker a ride.

But there may be a way for neighborhoods of people to do this with an orderly registration system...you could prearrange the carpools for more locally familiar people going to the same general locations, and your name and address etc would be known in advance in a central database...a bit more structured to prevent dangerous situations perhaps.

This is a wonderful idea. All one needs is a towel. And be wary of Vogons. ;o)

Thanks for the nice exploration of what appears to be a viable Silver BB.

-best,

Wolf in YVR BC

I have thought this so many times!!!

If we could just have some semblance of good leadership, this plan could be done and make the biggest bite in oil consumption we've ever seen.

Phil,
Bright minds think alike . Roughly around the end of September SmartCarpooling.com should begin an eerily similar service to what you proposed, if you were hanging out around Austin, TX's coffee houses about 2 months ago, you should know that its rude to eavesdrop. ;-)
Our development team has gone home for the day, but I will try to get a form up below our current joke image ASAP so that anybody interested in being an alpha tester of the service, the iPhone app, mobile app, or the FB app can do so as soon as they become available. Sorry for the plug in, but it seems like you've been overhearing the conversations behind SmartCarpooling.com and many of your readers seem like the people that will benefit the most by our service.
See you guys soon and as always very interesting posts,
Mario Pulido
mario(at)SmartCarpooling.com

It seems to me that with iHitch, we are talking about adding an additional level of complexity to solve a problem of resource scarcity. In many ways, it would be better to use a less complex system. If nothing else, complex systems are likely to be expensive, especially for smaller cities. They also will not work if there are power outages, and these are likely to be more frequent in the years ahead.

I believe that in Cuba, Castro made it illegal to pass a hitch-hiker and not pick him up, if there was space in the car. I don't think people in this country would be willing to live with such a solution, even if it were fairly safe because of all the other riders.

Need to figure out how iHitch.com gets paid. How about transactions getting handled electronically through a "Paypal" type system.

Ride negotiation and payment terms are handled prior to rider entering vehicle. A driver and rider are "vetted" via each's criteria list.

Drivers and riders are not introduced to each other by the system unless they match each other's criteria.

If they do and the donation is close to the requested donation, the driver and rider are introduced via quick pix.

Only after both have agreed to terms will their GPS units reveal whereabouts for convergence.

Payment will be handled automatically when the GPS units of both driver and rider show they are both in the driver's car.

Payment can be handled either as a fixed fee per ride or fixed fee per mile travelled. If miles travelled the correct amount will be transacted at the termination of the ride.

This probably will have to be a commercial and paying business simply because it will be coming up against monied interests such as taxicabs. Having it run as a business eliminates many of the bureaucratic issues because it will become a taxible business and fit into the normal commercial structure of things. The riders and drivers are independent contracters very similar to their role on eBay. iHitch will not take any responsibility past ensuring that riders and drivers match each others criteria. iHitch is a commissioned matchmaker and trusted payment service that brings together riders and drivers in a realtime market.

The rating idea can be embellished with a web of trust. If I pick up a rider and it works well for both of us, we can add each other to a list of trusted agents. If the six degrees of separation business has any validity it would allow a driver to place high value on a rider who was given a ride by a friend or acquaintance.

Employer trust groups could also be set up so people who work for a common employer can set a high trust value on other employees. The sophistication of selection schemes seems truly endless.

I like the possibility of using an iPhone. If the iPhone gets GPS (it may have it for all I know) then the manufacturing end of things has been taken care of. The other hot part is that iPhone people are Apple fanatics and this gives them a bit of rapport prior to meeting. No manufacturing costs - everything is software and Web 2.0. Sounds like a great idea to me.

When the driver and rider are within a few hundred yards they use the iPhone as a walkie talkie to make final arrangements for meeting.

Since every transaction is fully archived the safety of a system like this should make it much less dangerous than public transit.

Good thinking, Phil.

Gail,

Regarding complexity. I'm punishing myself during retirement by studying Organic Chemistry and Molecular Biology. No, I'm not very good at, sad to say. But I come away with a clear sense that the one thing we can say about life is that it's not simple. There is nothing simple about it. But it is stable. And that's what really counts. Stability, not simplicity. I believe it is possible to engineer hyper complex software systems that are robust, low power and stable. I'm not so sure about the low-power end of this but look at Google. When was the last time you Googled for something and got an announcement that Google was "down for maintenance," or "temporarily offline due to an undiagnosed failure?"

One thing that will come of a system like iHitch is that many people who have similar travel habits will become acquainted and continue to rideshare after the initial introduction. I see iHitch as a wonderful enabling technology in that sense. I see it as an introduction and matchmaking service as well as a great alternative to public transit for the occasional ride.

I don't see it as a step in a fundamentally wrong direction because it accomplishes what amounts to a miracle. Remember Paul Simon's classic line in "Cars are Cars?" "We roll up our windows and pretend we're immune." Anything that starts to break down the psychosocial isolation of the automobile is, in my opinion, good by definition. The dominant transportation space starts becoming a social space as well. That's wonderful, wouldn't you agree?

It really does not need to be that complex, here in DC we have had slugs http://www.slug-lines.com/ as part of the culture forever. It is a change in mindset more than technology.

Personal Rapid Transit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Rapid_Transit

In Italy we are experimenting with a "low tech" hitchhiking scheme, named "Jungo".
http://www.jungo.it (in Italian, sorry).

The idea is to provide both hitchhikers and drivers with a ID card, that can be quickly tested using a SMS. You can give feedback (positive or negative) to the issuing organization, and the hiker pays a small kilometric fee, to encourage drivers to join. The SMS itself enables tracking, and discourages potentially offensive behaviors.

It has been tested in a "Jungo cradle", in Trento, and waiting times dropped to 20% in a couple of weeks. The main problem with hitchhiking, as it can be seen in comments here, is confidence, and this is boosted if some third party can guarantee the reliability of the hiker/driver.

I am used to urban hitchhiking, and I seldom met potentially dangerous situations, here in Italy. Nothing that can't be handled with a "OK, I am arrived here" and a strongly negative feedback. Extraurban hiking is more difficult, I agree, I am male, and Italy is not a violent place. Somehwere else may be not so easy.

Gasoline Rationing

For this to work you need a complete change of the car (my personal living room, not a means of transport) culture ( my personal way to freedom) mind.
You could attain this culture change by gasoline rationing. Gasoline is only provided to drivers who manage a 50 or 60% occupancy rate of their car seats.
Every transport service one provides counts for the gasoline account, and gasoline can´t be payed for in cash.

A brilliant idea that should be encouraged as a way to save fuel and the enviornment.
The big problem is that there would be numerous legal hurdles. Does the driver have car insurance that covers paying passengers? Think of the fun lawyers would have after accidents. Unless governments pass legistlation that protects all parties the scheme would be too much of a risk for most motorists to consider.
If it does get up it would promote a better society through increased social interactions.

Quote from above article: "if it's two tonnes of metal carrying one person then it is grossly inefficient."

[i]And this is where efficiency can be improved the most![/i]

How often is only one or two persons sitting in a car? How often do you see like 10 or less persons in coach/bus? That's 1000-2000kg per person.

I think bikes have the future. Whether it is pedalbike, scooter or motorbike. The energy consumption per person carried is way less.

You still are in control of your own vehicle (don't forget, freedom in transport is very important to people) no annoying passengers, no waiting times, no standing still in traffic jams, no parking problems.
... and you look cool! (guess what sort of tranportation I use) :P

Actually, goloco.org does almost everything described.. you have to put down the destination that you want to go to and the time and it matches you with others going that way...
i agree that its not exactly the same vision but then again its probably the closest alternative available...

check it out...

You might rather call it something like 'iShare' instead of 'iHitch' to avoid problematic associations.

I've been thinking about this for years. I strongly believe that America's survival greatly depends on its ability to turn disadvantage (lack of mass transit) into advantage. With a computer network and a GPS, the cluster**** we have can instantly be transformed into a mass transit network. It would never be too terribly efficient because it relies on far too many drivers. But it would at least prevent an immediate economic catastrophe.

The system I envisioned was a website where you sign in as a Driver and a map pops up and you draw onto the map the route you plan on taking. And thats it. They will text you or mark it on your map where to pick someone up if they need a ride.

Or, if you need a ride then you sign in as a Rider and draw onto the map where you are and where you need to go. And the system would come back with a list of potential rides. Lets say one at 2pm, one at 2:30, and one at 4:15. So you pick the one at 2:30 and viola. They are informed that they have a passenger, and you wait to be picked up. The beauty of it is that no one would be going out of their way. (Although I guess you could configure your account so that you could pick people up out of your way, for an extra charge.)

There are a host of small companies that are doing this already. But their services are crude to say the least. The map interface needs a minimal $10 million investment. And obviously this whole thing would rely on promotions. That's the biggest issue. Their business models are all wrong, because they are charging fees right off the bat. It has to be free to get the business to grow. Free first 30 rides, free first 6 months, etc. This would cost millions because someone would have to pay all these drivers until this thing really got off the ground. But once it did... whooo the potential for profit is sky high. We're talking about a 100 billion dollar market in 10 years. For a business with relatively low overhead. I wanted to start my own company along these lines but I really dont care who gets rich off this because if someone doesnt find a way to do it then we're all screwed because this is the only way for the US economy to maintain the liquidity provided by all these personal vehicles under a context of rising fuel costs. Like I said, its about turning disadvantage into advantage.

After WWII, there was a lot of hitchhiking. It continued well into the 70's. But, the increasing incidence of violence led to the public service announcements, and parents teaching their kids - Never Pick Up A Hitchhiker!!

Article about a month ago in the OKC Daily Oklahoman. 60 year old man picks up 2 guys hitchhiking with a gas can. They force him to drive to a park, anal rape and sodomize him multiple times, tie him to a tree and leave with his car. He is found the next morning. COUNT ME OUT - and if you are smart do the same yourselves.

Phil,

I'm not sure if all this is needed. You are proposing a technological solution for a problem that is non-technical.

If people want to hitch-hike, they can do so today. Even in Europe, where gas is close to US$10/gallon, this does not happen much anymore.

It appears that some of what has been discussed above has been implemented already:

www.pickuppal.com/

pick up pal [pik-uhp-pal] - noun

a global eco-friendly transportation revolution that connects drivers, passengers, and packages with the places they need to go

And there is this, too: www.carpoolworld.com/

-- PB / WDC

Car insurance in most of the US is way more than the cost of fuel even at these prices. In the event of an accident and injury to a passenger and it is discovered you received compensation for the ride then that would be considered commercial use of the vehicle which could invalidate the policy. In the US there are commercial driver regulations that would apply to this scheme. Drivers would need to pass a Department of Transportation physical and drug screening. Just the use of certain medications including one used to stop smoking could be grounds for flunking the physical. Leave out the part where riders pay for a ride and the insurance and governmental regulations disappear. You just happen to be helping out a neighbor.

Hi guys!

I had an idea almost exactly like this about a year ago, and I looked into patenting it. Turns out there's already patents out there on cell-phone driven hitch-hiking. :( Maybe in Australia you could implement it, since our patents here probably only hold in the U.S.

People had some negative things to say about the system being too complex but I disagree. I think that with some open-source cell phone technology, such as google's Android, anyone could write an app to do this hitch-hiking thing. I don't know much about phone's ability to locate themselves accurately but I'd assume it's decent.

Anyway I hope that hitch-hiking becomes cool/safe again in the U.S., one way or another. I've always wanted to do it, but as a lone girl it's just too stupid of a risk to take.

I think the described idea is unfortunately not practical in short terms.
I am a long time mobile developer, also I participated also with projects involving GPS and other methods for location of the position of the user.
There are two main reasons this is not practical.
First - in the next few years the majority of the phones will be without GPS, because only the high-end models get GPS. I doubt there will be even 10% of the new mobile phones in the next 3 years will be sold with GPS.
Second - even if you have GPS the quality of the GPS hardware built in the mobile phones is quite bad. Just some clouds and the you don't get any location anymore on your mobile. This will be hardly acceptable for the system described in the article.

A lower level technology solutions involving web and/or sms interface have a better chance simply because they can provide some value now. I see a GPS solution possible only as nice extra feature on the basis of people arranging their routes through the web.

This is a great idea. A really really great idea.

Problem is it's not likely to happen barring a real crisis.

Car sharing of this type would be a huge threat to the taxi industry and other entrenched players and those industries cannot be expected to just sit back and let this happen. They will do everything in their power to stop this kind of thing from happening and do everything conceivable to undermine it should it start. We should not underestimate their power. I do not think this kind of thing will be allowed (legally) unless there is a real sense of crisis (environmental or oil supply).

Car sharing involving money is illegal in almost all of the United States. Very illegal and vigorously prosecuted. If you accept money you are considered a cab and if you do not have a medallion you are arrested.

Hitchhiking is illegal in most places.

You cannot get insurance in my state for a car that will be shared on a regular basis with non family members (even if no money is involved). They will not sell it to you at any cost. I asked about this when I was thinking about another idea. It's *state law*. I suspect that most states have this same restriction. This alone pretty much puts the kibosh on this kind of car sharing given that you cannot drive *at all* in my state without car insurance!

Car sharing has been seriously limited, made illegal or discouraged for decades. In my city (Chicago) jitneys were outlawed in the mid 60's. There is a state law against hitchhiking. In Chicago IL this whole idea is a non starter without serious changes to the law. And not just one law but a bunch.

The taxi industry where I live takes this stuff very seriously. "Gypsy" cabs are fought like mad. Certain seemingly minor offenses are felonies. They feel their livelihood is at stake and clearly they would be threatened by High-Tech Hitchhiking and will fight tooth and nail against this.

So don't expect high tech hitchhiking to be legally allowed barring a major crisis.

I had this thought a couple of months ago, too.

As mentioned upthread, there is the issue of vetting passengers and drivers. There would also need to be a way to verify the identity of the passenger and driver. You could do this using biometrics or a password when a passenger requests a ride through the service or when a driver accepts a passenger request.

The driver and the passenger should use the centralized service to prevent unwanted sharing of personal information. The service should provide anonymized email addresses and an 800 number. Drivers and passengers should be able to blacklist each other.

The service should track the planned destination of the driver and the passenger, and attempt to contact both the driver and passenger if the car veers too far off-course, or stops in a secluded area.

The passenger application should have a way to quickly specify a destination: "Home", "Work", "The Grocery Store". Only the driver needs a fancy GPS cell phone with a version of this app, BTW. The passenger only needs an ID card and a web application.

An idea like this could work even without making it a private taxi service or hitch-hiking application, it could also suggest potential carpooling partners based on patterns of telemetry - that might be a better beachhead because people would be less afraid of picking up hitchhikers if they had a trusted companion in the car with them.

Great post. Carpooling is the transport system of the future! It only makes sense, there is plenty of 'rolling stock' out there, we just need to use it more effectively.

Look at http://www.hoverport.org or http://flexiblecarpooling.org for our take on how this should work (check out the animation on hoverport.org).

It has some similarities to the sluglines/casual carpooling, but adds some valuable features like origin end parking, membership with prescreening, technology to track participation (but importantly NOT for prearranging a ride), and 'ride credits' for sharing the benefits.

It is not easy to bring a new idea like this into being. Anyone with avenues to public or equity money that would like to join the ride, please use the contact details from the websites.

We've developed the technologies and software and the system is pretty well ready to go. The real challenges are transportation officials support, and funding. The main reasons for lack of support: they are not convinced it will work so don't want to be first, and they are afraid if it does work it will take people off the buses (and you know about the theology of buses).

Hi,

great idea ihitch. Getting around the tax laws is simple. Don't charge anyone. The govt. can't stop generosity .

Tim