Transportation can be one of the biggest headaches for UCLA students, who live in a city where much of the population is dependent on automobiles.
Zimride, a student carpool service, was created by UCLA students to assist with the many transportation issues the campus faces, said Tessa Petrich, vice president of marketing for Zimride.
The new service helps students find and connect with carpool rides from campus to other parts of California.
Zimride is accessible online as an application via Facebook. Once users add the application, they can post and offer requests for carpool rides to and from campus.
The carpooling service assists students who have a car and are looking to split costs or to use the carpool lane on the 405 and other crowded freeways, Petrich said.
The service has proven to be successful so far, with over 600 students signing up for the service in just a couple of months, Petrich said.
Users can be specific about what times and days they are looking to carpool and can keep track of past rides. They can also give and receive feedback about how well their rides went.
The idea was first presented to UCLA Transportation, who found it to be a very interesting idea and went with it, said David J. Karwaski, planning and policy manager at UCLA Transportation.
Zimride shares a common goal with UCLA Transportation: increasing carpooling and therefore decreasing the number of solo drivers, Karwaski said.
“Fifty-seven percent of UCLA commuters drive alone, and our goal is to decrease this to only 50 percent,” he added.
Facebook is a great way to market and raise student awareness of Zimride because so many students use the social networking site, Karwaski added. Facebook also helps bring down the barrier of not knowing the person you are carpooling with, Petrich said.
“A student would not necessarily want to carpool with someone on Craigslist,” Petrich said.
But a Facebook application would allow students to see the profiles of others who they would be carpooling with, creating a sense of familiarity, she said.
Mindy Steinberg, a second-year Latin American studies graduate student, has already used Zimride several times to travel to and from Berkeley to UCLA. Steinberg was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley and travels back and forth frequently.
“Zimride is wonderful because it allows you to familiarize yourself with the person you are carpooling with, like finding friends you have in common. I’ve had a wonderful experience with it,” she said.
Carpooling would not only help ease the stress of commuting for the UCLA community, but it would also help the environment, Karwaski said.
He said that 11 percent of the campus’s carbon footprint is from commuting alone, adding that UCLA is trying to decrease that number.
Carpooling would decrease the amount of cars on the road, therefore decreasing the amount of the emissions, he said.