2007-05-04

HOVER

[Blog reposted from CommuterPageBlog, posted May 03, "Is a More Formalized Slugging in Our Future?"]

Our good friend Kristina over at the Make It Better blog forwarded a tip so interesting that we had to share. A company in New Zealand called Trip Convergence is marketing a service called HOVER (High Occupancy Vehicles in Express Routes) that provides a flexible way for people to carpool and thus increase the capacity of the road network and fight congestion. And according to their web site does this for a quarter the cost of new roads and half as much as new bus service, while being faster to implement. From their website:
"One of the biggest wasted resources in our cities is the thousands of empty seats that travel our transportation system every day. HOVER provides the transportation system a way of accessing those seats. A significant increase in ride sharing would bring about many benefits for most cities, including reducing congestion and its costs, relieving pressure on infrastructure, reducing consumption of fossil fuels, reducing emissions from those fuels, saving commuters money, time, resources, and building better communities."
Isn't this just what everyone wants? Sounds great, so how's it work?

If I'm understanding the concept correctly, it simply sounds like slugging (instant or casual ridesharing - perhaps they haven't heard of that term in New Zealand) from a series of "HOVERPorts" (think park and ride lots or garages) around the periphery of an urban area. They call it "Instant Facilitated Carpooling." The difference from traditional ridesharing or from the slugging we have now is that the instant rideshare is facilitated by a membership system that allows the sharing of ride credits between riders and drivers. Everything is tracked providing members with RFID tags. The HOVERPort sounds very high tech and very cool. As cars enter the facility they are directed to areas of the facility where people going to similar destinations gather. Drivers enter the center lane and wait while riders move to the side and park and then get in the cars in the center lane and take off.

Our area, largely because of the HOV system, has a great tradition of ridehsharing. In addition to Commuter Connection's traditional ridesharing service we have a long tradition of slugging too. More recently NuRide and GoLoco have entered the market to support more casual forms of ridesharing. Perhaps this HOVER system could help too. It's at least worth discussing. There's a great YouTube video on the HOVERPort web site that describes through an animation how this all works. Take a look and enjoy. I hope we'll be hearing more about this idea. We can use all the help we can get around here.

Chris Hamilton is the Commuter Services Chief for Arlington County, manager of CommuterPageBlog and a biking/Metro commuter from Rosemont in Alexandria.


Here's the video, in case you're too lazy to check the website itself:

Just as an aside, though I do find this concept fascinating, it's the implementation of such ideas where things go awry... I suppose with a hub in Frederick MD, Chantilly VA and maybe south of Baltimore that may cover the main avenues of commute... But I still see this as putting a lot of faith in people volunteering to drive every so often. However, there are (as mentioned above) several commuter car/van pools in the area that work well. Maybe such a formalized and centralized approach would work.


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