Breadcrumbs

Car sharing

Did you know up to 80% of cars travelling to work in the rush hour have only a driver in them? That means there are over 38 million empty seats on the UK's roads every day.

What is car sharing?

Car sharing is when two or more people share a car and travel together. It allows people to benefit from the convenience of the car, whilst alleviating the associated problems of congestion and pollution.

What are the benefits of sharing a car?

Car sharing benefits individuals and the environment by:

Saving you money - travelling with others, even if only once a week, will enable you to reduce your overall travel costs.
Reducing congestion - combining journeys leads to fewer cars on the road, making it easier to get around and find a parking space.
Reducing pollution - by sharing cars you can reduce your emission of Carbon Dioxide (CO2), which is a major cause of climate change.

The University of Northampton car-sharing scheme

The University of Northampton operates a car-sharing scheme, in partnership with liftshare.com designed to help put you in touch with potential travel companions.

To use the scheme, just register yourself and your journey details for free; you can use your University email address or a personal email address, but if you want to use a personal email address you will need to obtain the 'group password' from Paul Taylor in order to complete the registration process.

The liftshare.com system will then match you with other registered members who live nearby and with whom you could share the journey to and from the University. You don't have to car share every day - once or twice a week will still make a real difference.

Do you live in or near Northampton, Corby, Market Harborough, Kettering, Wellingborough, Daventry, Towcester, Brackley, Leicester, Bedford, Milton Keynes, Dunstable, Aylesbury, Banbury, Rugby or Coventry? There are registered members of the University Carshare scheme who want to share lifts from these places, and you might be their perfect match. Why not register now to find out?

Initially when you register, there may not be any positive matches shown by the system, but as more and more people register journeys the likelihood of a match increases. Therefore, please encourage your friends and colleagues at the University to register themselves and their journeys so that we can all make the most of this scheme. As well as reducing your travel costs, the scheme will assist in reducing congestion and pollution around Northampton and the surrounding county, and will ease pressure on our overloaded car parking facilities.

Registered member?

The specialist software has been provided by liftshare.com, the UK 's no.1 car-sharing company. liftshare.com has extensive experience of setting up car sharing schemes and has established more than 200 schemes across the UK for a range of clients. You can access The University of Northampton Carshare scheme from any computer with an internet connection. Once registered, you can choose whether to search for potential matches only with other registered members of The University of Northampton Carshare group, or search for matches within the wider liftshare.com database.

If you have any problems with the system, or would like to register but do not have a University email address, please contact Paul Taylor.

If you drive to work, why not look at the number of cars around you without any passengers? Then consider if each car took 1 passenger, half of those cars would disappear.

National liftshare week is promoted by national and local radio stations, and dozens of news publications.

Talking about liftshare Day, BBC Radio2 DJ Chris Evans said:

That's brilliant. We thought we were going to be down on this story but it's actually a really good idea. If you think about how the congestion charge has cut traffic in London then saving half your fuel costs by sharing cars will have an even bigger impact.