A social network for carpooling

Abstract

The larger amount of motor vehicles produces many problems to cities around the world as poor urban mobility, environment concerns and people's health. The encouragement to use alternative means of transport, such as bicycles or subways is one of the steps to solve the problem. Another way is to encouraging the optimal usage of private automobiles. In Brazil, for instance, several studies show an underused space in cars and great potential for the use of carpooling and carsharing. Unfortunately, there is not such a unified technological mean to properly support these alternatives. In this paper we propose and implement a social network to support the use of carpooling. We show that there is a favorable context for the use of this social network with the specific purpose to share rides among users. We describe the architecture of the system and implementation details. We present results about systems's accessibility and its acceptability by people around the globe.