Big things are going on in Leeds. There is a motion in the referendum this week, should the university support car sharing? We think they definitely should and here’s why:
1) It will mean much cheaper travel for everyone. If you need a lift you can hop over to Manchester for £4 or down to London for £15.
If you are driving, you get a useful contribution towards your fuel. Helpful when fuels prices are hitting record highs.
2) We’ve built goCarShare around Facebook so that you can make sure you share the journey with fun people – see if you have friends in common, or whether you like the same band so there will be no fighting over what tunes get played.
3) Driving on your own is vary bad for eco points but driving in a full car is up there with taking the train in terms of green ways to travel.
4) It’s door to door (or pretty close) no more lugging bags around town… no one likes that.
5) Did I mention that goCarShare is completely free to use?
Whether you vote for us or not we’ll be back to campus doing fun stunts to get the word out (did anyone see Gabs, our operatic lady complete with moustache singing on the union steps?) but getting university backing would be really great, more awareness = more car share opportunities and more fun adventures.
We’ll leave it your safe hands but we are quietly confident that when it comes to voting this week, you’ll choose wisely.
The goCarShare Team
There is a very good book coming out this week, ‘What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption‘ discusses an upcoming shift in consumer behaviour towards sharing possessions and using assets more affectively.
It’s a movement that goCarShare are a small part of – there are many other websites that are helping people shop in a different way and share more effectively. This list is but a small part of them and it would be great to hear others that people have come across.
Streetcar has a fleet of cars that you can hire by the hour and share the cost of ownership with other people, Whipcar has a different take on this – you can effectively hire your neighbour’s car by the day. Then there is ParkatmyHouse where you can locate people hiring out their parking spaces and save money.
EcoModo let’s you hire out everyday objects. Need a electric
drill? You can hire one out for £3.30 a day, a flute? That will cost you £9.46 per week.
If you are off on your travels and you need someone else to stay, rather than going to an overpriced hotel, you can stay with a nice host on Crashpadder or if you are after a cosy place to stay in the country and a hearty meal too, how about trying bedandfed?
Or if you are a budding chef, you can turn your living room into a restaurant for a night with housebites.
In summary, there are quite a few websites that will not only save you a lot of money, they will help you meet new people and have fun too. Definitely worth giving them a try.
