At the end of last week I had the pleasure of experiencing the French train strike first hand. On Thursday, it was pretty much impossible to move - many stations, including mine, were competely closed - so I didn’t. On Friday, however, I had to get into Paris, and was lucky enough to find a friend with a diesel Grand Scénique 7 seater who had a space left, literally one space.

As we were crawling into work (and out again that evening) I started thinking about car pooling, as we were a perfect example of a well-organised car pool - even if a one-off. In our case it was a group of parents with children at the same school, living 10 miles outside Paris, and with roughly the same destination in the big smoke - and on Friday it really was the big smoke, as CO2 emissions hit an all-time high for the season. It took all of an hour for the 6 additional passengers to be found, and we all agreed that, were it not for the extremely efficient train system to the west of Paris (when not on strike), we would do this all the time.

Ok, so in general I don’t need to go to work by car, but we all know that there are people who pretty much have no choice. They don’t live near a station or a bus route, they have to drop the kids off on the way, their office is not near a station, etc etc. What is scary, however, is how many of these people travel to work by car ON THEIR OWN. This fact was brought home to me just by looking around during the total of 4 hours journey to and from work on Friday. Having noticed how many cars had just one person in them, I started to count, and, out of 100 cars, 83 were in this category. 83%! This may have been extreme because of the strike, but imagine if every car had just 2 people in - already the traffic divided by two, and therefore the CO2 emissions divided by two.

So, as is my habit these days, I decided to put myself in the position of someone with no other option but to take the car, but who is concerned about CO2 emissions. I logged onto Google, and started to search for car pooling options. The good news is that they do exist. The bad news is that the resources are still pretty limited, with good concentrations around major cities, but overall to my mind not enough promotion and not enough action. Those living in the London area have several options, including a site proposed by Transport For London - London Liftshare (well done Ken), but moving further afield, things get patchy pretty quickly. It’s the same for other major European countries - the idea is there, but we are far, far away from critical mass.

Car pooling has to be one of the simplest ways to have an immediate effect on CO2 emissions, but I don’t think people today realise how easy it is to set up. I think think they need help, and encouragement, ideally from the government. Here are just a few ideas to mull around:

  • school car pools. Schools are the perfect meeting place for people - who often will know each other - who will often then head on to work in the same area by car
  • car pool lanes on the motorway. It works in the US, why shouldn’t it work here? Want to get to work quicker? Car pool
  • official car pool sites, set up or managed by town councils. Many towns have one or more big businesses who are the major employers for the area. They can work together with the town councils by encouraging employees to car pool
  • car pools for all public workers: teachers, nurses, postal workers, the police. Anywhere where this a large movement of people to and from the same place, where they are also susceptible to be living near to each other.

As I showed in my simple equation above, whilst it would be a dream to have four people in every car, just insisting on two would make a difference. We need to try harder to make this happen.