The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Hit ‘commuteeasy’ route on your work day

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Friday, Nov 28, 2008
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Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

Hit ‘commuteeasy’ route on your work day

Staff Reporter

The second car pool initiative in the city launched

— Photo: V. Sreenivasa Murthy

Way to go: (From left) Actor Anu Prabhakar, Additional Commissioner of Police (Traffic) Praveen Sood, cricket commentator Charu Sharma and cricketer Robin Uthappa, at the launch of ‘Let’s Pool In’ in Bangalore on Thursday.

BANGALORE: FM Radio One and CommuteEasy on Thursday launched “Let’s Pool In”, a new initiative to popularise car pooling. This will be the second such initiative on car pooling in the city.

Registration

In the new initiative, commuters can register themselves on www.commuteeasy.com and locate those headed for a common destination.

“You can look for car-sharing partners, depending on your work timing and the route. One can offer or accept a ride,” Vipul Kasera of Commute Easy told presspersons here.

New thinking

Shyju Varkey, Station Head of Radio One, Bangalore, said there was a need to think of transportation alternatives that would reduce the number of cars on the city’s roads. “If everyone left their car behind for at least one trip each week, traffic jams would be a thing of the past,” he said.

Additional Commissioner of Police (Traffic) Praveen Sood said there were 32 lakh vehicles for a population of 60 lakh in the city today. Such an abnormally high number of vehicles could be reduced by car pooling, he said.

Car pooling is not new to the city. Navratan Kataria, a software engineer, started carpool-bangalore@yahoogroups.com in 2000. There are as many as 300 people who have become its members.

Surprisingly, there are about 120 pool cars involved in the initiative now.

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