Stephanie Vincent, a researcher at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) talks about carpooling, a form, with car sharing, optimized use of the car.
Part 1: A Short History of carpooling in France
Share his car to help reduce travel costs, can make friends and - the icing on the cake - it's good for the environment! These are the arguments frequently advanced by the proponents of solo car carpool to rally to this practice. In these times of widespread mobilization environmentalist, let's look more specifically for this purpose better understand it. Or when a sociologist interested in carpooling ...
Carpooling, something new?
If carpooling occupies the front of the media spotlight since a dozen years, yet he is not born in the early 2000s. Indeed, carpooling seems to be a form of organized hitchhiking. Hitchhiking existed even before spilling possession of cars. Thus, the "hobo" vagrants from the late nineteenth century, were traveling illegally on freight trains to cross from east to west in North America. Later, this practice would transposed onto trucks, then cars.
In France, what we now call "carpool" seems to have emerged with the birth of the association Allostop in Paris in 1958 who aspired to connect drivers and passengers for journeys of " organized hitchhiking. " This same combination will be one of the first to use the term "carpool", imported from Quebec Premier in 1989. It was this same year that found the term carpool for the first time in an order of transport.
Practice Development or visibility?
Since 1958, other stakeholders - associations, companies or institutions - were also created to develop carpool. A plethora of websites offering to connect the carpool for trips exceptional (on vacation) or more regular (especially on the commute). This explosion in the number of services linking carpool carpool then given a higher profile. But they also are carpoolers that many sites?
sites linking with only a virtual existence on the canvas had until the mid-2000s, the sentence to reflect the number of crews really made; only the number of registrants were subject to statistics. In addition, these sites were rather the creation of crews for long-distance travel and will not take place only once.
Other services linking, association status, have settled in parts of France. These associations put available to carpoolers, besides a matchmaking service, office space and telephone reception. These associations have developed through the canvassing of businesses or organizations by providing a system for linking employee carpools for commuting. Supported local institutions, some have even become over the years agencies mobility.
Companies carpool even emerged in the 2000s, seeking to sell a service linking the carpool commuting or during certain events. Mues, originally, by a militant desire to develop this practice, they gradually managed to make their business a lucrative business, particularly through subcontracting production of Travel Plans.
