Addressing the financial and environmental impacts of personal and business travel

CarShare Online

CarShare Online is available to organisations wishing to decrease corporate costs and improve their environmental credentials by promoting travel sharing among their employees.

CarShare Online allows staff wishing to share journeys to contact others who live near to them and want to travel to a similar destination around the same time of day. 

It includes motorised modes (car and taxi) as well as walking, cycling and running.  Journeys that can be shared include regular commutes, as well as one-off journeys (e.g. to a conference or a different office).  As well as defining start and end locations, the software incorporates ‘waypoints’ – for example, a railway station- where two or three people can meet and go onwards in one vehicle. 

It works automatically by restricting access to those who have specific company email addresses, ensuring security for those using the system. The software has user-friendly interfacing and uses Google™ mapping to locate potential sharers.

The system is very flexible and can be tailored for a single organisation or several companies who wish for their collective employees to travel to work together such as at a Business Park location.  It might be in response to a specific operational challenge such as over demand for car parking spaces, lack of appropriate public transport provision or the need for staff to regularly travel between transport hubs or offices.

There are two installation options: by accessing a secure server at TRL via an internet web browser; or having the system installed on your company intranet. Both methods comply to the latest levels of security and Data Protection legislation.

The main advantages of CarShare Online are:

• friendly, easy to use interface for registering and searching journeys;
• ability to define travel preferences including time, days, and gender of sharer; 
• can be seamlessly branded to the same corpoate look and feel of an organisation;
• secure access using specific email addresses and passwords;
• requires no staff time to manage;
• regular reports including uptake and financial and environmental savings;
• simple to access via the internet or locally via an intranet;
• can cover any size of organisation and grows with staff numbers;
• can accommodate single organisations or groups of companies.