What is the smarter and cost-effective way to commute to work?

[freetothink]

traffics have been come part of daily problems to work. John and i just come back from a business trip to China. Most chinese have bicycles and motorcycles, unlike Americans have fancy V6, V12s. Yet, we have daily traffic jams while wasting away the expensive fuel at low efficiency. I don't want to waste any more of my time and money to work. I need better solution to commute to work.

[agreeableveil158]

If you are living in the US then you know the Bus systems are pretty nasty at times. If it's less than five miles and warm I would recommend a bike. Otherwise set up a car pool with your co-workers. That way you only have to drive every few days and you get to use the carpool lane.

[tim_90034]

Traffic congestion is a serious problem to any big city, especially those containing business districts like Los Angeles. Tall commercial buildings contain thousands of companies. When living spaces are limited in those cities, people must live in cities further away from the city in which they work. Statistics shows 78.2% of people drive alone, meaning more cars on the freeway—a major cause of traffic congestion. The capacity of the freeway system is maxed out. The government tries to spend billions of dollars to expand freeways, especially in bottleneck sections. Looking closely, bottleneck sections are not only at the intersections of freeways, but also at most of the freeway exits. There is usually an extra lane for freeway exits, and you will easily find people using those lanes and then merging back right before the exit, thus forming another bottleneck. Therefore, bottlenecks are everywhere.

To reduce traffic congestion, people might try to find alternative ways to get to work—alternative routes, public transportation, carpooling, etc. When there are too many cars, it actually does not help much to take alternative routes because each route might already be packed with cars. Public transportation helps, but only to groups of people who have offices or homes closer to train/bus stations. The effective solution is indeed to reduce the number of cars, or increase occupancy in cars. Carpooling effectively achieves this. It is also a solution to the high cost of transportation, because higher occupancy rates can lead to savings from expenses such as gasoline, oil, tires, auto depreciation, tolls, parking, and in some cases insurance. Last but not least, it is a solution to the boredom of driving alone to work because carpooling also provides social connections and business networking in an increasingly disconnected society.

Although carpooling to work is a sound solution, finding a carpool buddy is always difficult, especially in this increasingly disconnected society. You may find a friend living in the same city, but working in a different city; or, you may find a coworker working in the same city, but living in a different city.

To solve these problems, we have created a web service allowing people to search each other's profiles to form a carpool to work. With seven years of experience in software engineering, I see how technology can be used toward this solution. We have used Microsoft's latest .NET technology programming features, SQL Server as the back-end database supporting user information, and ASP.NET as the front-end providing a user-friendly interface. Around 10 of my friends are volunteering their time to help with this project; they are specialized in computer programming, web design, computer networking, software engineering, proofreading, content creation, marketing and advertising.

There are some online carpooling service provided by the government service; however, most of them are incomplete. They are not user friendly, they are lack of helpful features, and they don’t promote their services. Instead, we provide:

1. Rich user friendly profile
2. Unique privacy option feature
3. Radius search feature
4. Identity service
5. Online Service
6. Actively seeking customers and companies to join our services.

Our mission is to help the employees and the communities nationwide to that will save energy, pollution, traffic, and also the U.S. economy. We are providing the service for free; we would love to help first the people that need the service most.

Founder of Carpool To Work, Inc.
Timothy Chui