It is not new that Lebanese commuters suffer every day from the traffic and waste their time on the road waiting to get to their work or universities. It is also not new that cars are causing major pollution in the country. For that reason, Erik Zakhia, president of the environmental club at the American University of Beirut (AUB) came up with the idea of creating a website that would enable students to carpool to and from AUB.
Erik cooperated with Paul Salameh, an AUB alumni and software engineer, to implement the idea and here was the creation of Autopooling.com.
Autopooling.com helps students find and share rides to college. They indicate on a map their weekly trips to college and indicate whether they will take their cars or not. Each student then contacts other students who live nearby and on their way, in order to share rides with them.
The good thing about Autopooling is that it helps in reducing traffic and saving the environment. Students left comments and reviews about the website saying that it is a great initiative and it made their lives easier. They also made new friends while “autopooling” together.
After the success of Autopooling at AUB, they decided to expand to 12 other universities across Lebanon including LAU, USJ, and LU. The website currently allows not just students, but also employees to share rides to work. In fact, any person going to any location can post his weekly or one-time trips to all his locations of interest. Paul recently unveiled a new feature in the website: events which allow people who are going to Facebook events to carpool together to those locations.
Regarding security, the website allows users to send private internal messages to one another, so that no contact information is publicly displayed. Also, users can see each other’s Facebook profiles to know more about the persons they would be autopooling with.
Now that you know what Autopooling is about, would you consider registering and adding your trips, and living a new experience?
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