Carpooling is proving effective and popular in other countries. With congested traffic, high fuel prices, and belt-tightening all around, is it time that Irish motorists opened their car doors? asks FIONA MCCANN

WHETHER YOU'RE SPEEDING along a Seattle highway, or motoring out of Montreal, you may encounter a species of traffic sign unfamiliar to the Irish driver. The letters HOV are likely to figure, along with a 2+ symbol, and though it may look like its rightful place is on the periodic table rather than a North American roadway, this sign is there to signal a High Occupancy Vehicle lane. In other words, this lane is only for cars carrying two or more people. Lone-car occupants must watch other vehicles cruise in and pass them by, safe in the knowledge that by filling just one more car seat, they are fast-tracking their way through traffic.

These lanes, now a common feature across the US and Canada, with more than 4,000km of HOV lanes between them, are there to facilitate and encourage carpooling, or the shared use of a car by the driver and one or more passengers. Carpooling has long had its champions, having first begun across the Atlantic as a formal practice some time in the 1970s, touted for its positive effects on congestion, transport costs and the environment.

More recently, comedian Bill Maher made a good case for carpoolers in his 2002 book When You Ride Alone You Ride With Bin Laden, while the US television network ABC even aired a series around the concept, aptly entitled Carpoolers.

Here in Ireland, things have been a little slower to take off, but fluctuating fuel prices and worsening daily tailbacks are ample reason to get on board the carpooling concept.

Susan Fagan, from Lucan, first came across carpooling as a student in Germany more than four years ago. "It was a huge success," she recalls. Popular with students for its cost-saving element, those interested simply registered on a site linking people looking for lifts to those driving in empty cars.

"For somebody to register their car with the company, they had to register all their details, show a copy of their passport, a copy of their driver's licence and their car registration," she explains. "So everyone was registered and I didn't hear one bad story at all. You weren't just hopping in the car with any old lad."

For Fagan, the advantages of such a system were various. "It meant whoever was doing that journey could share petrol costs and had some company as well, so there was a social aspect as well as an ecological and financial one."

Fagan also lived in Australia and New Zealand over a two-year period, where she found carpooling alive and well. "It all just seemed to work," she says of the systems in place there. "I just don't know why it can't work here."

Eager to try it out at home, Fagan attempted to sign up for carpooling to this year's Electric Picnic, with frustrating results. "I went onto the site and tried to register and it kept crashing and was impossible for me," she says.

It's not the only website for avid carpoolers, however. Several international sites such as carpoolworld.com and carshare.com are open to Irish users, while www.dublintraffic.ie also offers bulletin boards for carpoolers as well as an option to register specific details about commuting routes. One which offers a slightly more advanced link-up system between commuters and drivers is Swift Commute (www.swiftcommute.ie), a college project by DCU students John Brady and Paul O'Donovan that includes an algorithm that matches potential carpoolers based on their map co-ordinates.

Swift Commute found a match for Italian Rossella Buonparte, who needed to get from Blanchardstown to her job in the city centre on a daily basis, but didn't have a car. "I got in touch with a girl from South Africa," she says. "It was very handy, so I carpooled for five or six months." For Buonparte, the carpooling experience was entirely positive, and beat public transport hands down. "On the bus, either you fall asleep or you get bored in traffic, whereas I could talk to this woman," she says. "We are still friends now."

Buonparte has since changed jobs, and now works in a different area, so she re-registered on Swift Commute in the hopes of finding another driver to share her journeys with. She's not alone: although the site has only been running for 12 months, it already boasts 300 members, with more growth expected in the coming months as schools reopen and roads become busier.

"Now that we're back heading into the winter, we probably will see our monthly membership increasing again," says the site's co-creator Paul O'Donovan, who adds that membership is free of charge.

O'Donovan feels it likely that carpooling will become more and more popular as rising fuel prices push commuters into finding ways to cut down on costs. "People seem to be happy enough to pay increasing fuel charges now, but maybe there's a threshold point at which they really feel they need to do something else," he says. "There aren't a huge amount of options as regards public transport for people in the commuter belt, so they might look to carpooling."

ONE WAY TO encourage the practice might be to introduce carpooling lanes. According to the Ontario Ministry of Transportation website in Canada, where HOV lanes have been in operation for some time, these additional lanes encourage carpooling and help cut down on congestion.

"Though results vary from place to place, nearly every area with highway HOV lanes reports that ride-sharing and highway capacity have increased, and that travel times have improved since the lanes opened," claims the site.

So when are HOV lanes going to be introduced in Ireland? Not any time soon, according to the Department of Transport. "The idea was examined in the department as part of the public consultation phase of the Sustainable Travel and Transport Action Plan that we are currently drafting. It is not expected at this stage that there will be an explicit action in the proposed Action Plan on this issue when it is published later this year," the department said in a statement. "It may be something that could be considered for car-club subscribers but there is no commitment for this at present."

Carpoolers such as Buonparte won't be happy. "That [introducing HOV lanes] is a good idea because if you look at the traffic you see every car in the morning is only one person, and you see three seats empty," she says. "It's a waste, if you're really thinking in terms of cost of petrol and traffic."

Fagan is angry that more is not being done by the Government to promote carpooling on Irish roads. "It shouldn't be that difficult [to carpool] really," she says. "The Government should be supporting it if they're trying to get people off the roads."

In the end, however, it may be financial necessity that pushes motorists to carpool. With expensive fuel and a recession looming, carpooling is likely to come under serious consideration, as O'Donovan points out.

"People's backs are up against the wall, so eventually they're going to have to start looking in that direction."

Streets ahead French carpoolers lead the way

LARA MARLOWE in Paris

France ranks among the top countries in Europe for co-voiturage (carpooling), with close to half a million French people practising this environmentally friendly, economical form of transport, says Frédéric Mazzella, the founder of covoiturage.fr, a website which links passengers and drivers. French carpoolers organise themselves via the internet. There are close to 200 French carpooling websites, but most people stick to the top three or four, because they offer the biggest selection. The most avid carpoolers live in western France, the Rhone Valley and around Paris.

"It is by far the cheapest form of transport," says Mazella. He gives the example of a Paris-Lyon journey, which costs €60 in petrol and €30 in tolls. "If a driver takes three passengers at €30 each, his trip is paid for."

To create confidence among regular users, drivers and passengers rate each other on a website. The site lists the driver's phone number, the price for the journey and whether the driver listens to music, smokes, likes to talk or accepts pets. Mazzella, 32, studied at the École Normale Supérieure, one of France's grandes écoles, at Stanford in California, and at the French business school, INSEAD. He launched covoiturage.fr in 2004 "because transport is too dear, and I wanted to do something useful". Some 400,000 journeys have been arranged on the site.

Comuto, the French company that backs covoiturage.fr, has contracts with 15 French companies to organise carpooling for their employees, and it finances websites in other EU countries. "We'd be delighted to develop carpooling in Ireland," says Mazzella. Interested parties can reach him Mazzella at contact@comuto.com. French civil society is way ahead of the government, which has so far provided no incentives for carpoolers. Although a draft law on the environment would encourage carpooling, a transport ministry source says the government is gripped by inertia.