Let's Carpool gets The Nudge to go nationwide

Wellington band The Nudge has teamed up with Greater Wellington to promote carpooling nationwide.

A video featuring the band on a carpooling journey has been produced to celebrate the transformation of the Wellington region’s Let’s Carpool scheme into a national venture. The nationwide initiative is the result of months of collaboration between Greater Wellington and Auckland Transport.

Let’s Carpool is an easy, safe and secure way to find carpooling partners. You simply register, key in some details of where you want to start your journey from and where you’re going to and all the searching for potential carpooling partners is done for you. The results are emailed to you and you take it from there.

More than 2200 people have registered with Let’s Carpool in Wellington since it was set up three years ago and two evaluations of the scheme have shown it to be successful in facilitating carpooling. The percentage of participants who drove alone to work decreased significantly from 35.7% to 28.6% between 2009 and 2012.

Fran Wilde, Chair of Greater Wellington, says she expects the national Let’s Carpool website to be as successful as the Wellington regional site has been. “It will be a great asset for many regions throughout New Zealand.

A national carpooling website makes excellent sense. It enables people to carpool across regions, so for example if you live in Otaki but work in Palmerston North, you can use just the one site to look for carpooling partners. No more searching multiple websites. It also saves on administrative costs. Instead of each council forking out money for our own websites, software and marketing activities we’re pooling resources and cutting the costs.”

Fran Wilde says the fact that Let’s Carpool is funded publicly gives the site a lot of credibility. “A lot of research, talent and effort has gone into Let’s Carpool, it’s not out to make a profit and it’s here for the long haul.”

Veteran Wellington carpooler Trevor Ede began carpooling with his workmate and neighbour back in 1987. The 25-year-old carpool now sources its members from the Let’s Carpool website. Their newest member Karen is their 38th carpooler. This long-standing arrangement has saved them money, lightened their carbon footprint and helped them get to know more people from their community.