BlaBlaCar – Journey Sharing Made Easy

I don’t usually write about specific services but I was introduced to one recently that does look pretty good. I have mentioned car pooling before but it was in relation to regular journeys that were made for work purposes but BlaBlaCar opens this up to longer journeys in the UK and around mainland Europe too.

There are obviously some pros and cons of sharing your car journey with somebody else but if you were planning on driving anyway, you could save on the greenhouse gas emissions and the cost at the same time.

It’s amazingly good value for some routes – at the time of writing there are one way seats from London Euston to Birmingham New Street stations for just £10 which is a considerable saving on a train ticket given that this journey takes place during the peak time where a single seat on a train can cost 8 times as much.

It would also be a big saving on the cost of petrol if you were considering driving yourself. According to the website, sharing this journey with another motorist would save around 49kg of CO₂ equivalent over separate car journeys (although I couldn’t find any information on how they calculate this figure).

According to their homepage, BlaBlaCar has led to 10 million shared journeys which equate to 500,000 fewer tonnes of CO₂ equivalent emissions. This sounds pretty good for a service which is also helping people save money but I do wonder how accurate this figure is.

Does it account for people who would have otherwise gone by train or coach where emissions would likely be lower? On the flip side, sharing a car journey from London to Paris (either by ferry or Eurostar) among 3 or 4 people is better than 1 person driving and the rest going by air so it’s swings and roundabouts.

I’m going to keep this post short – I could go on about the safety elements or how it works exactly but you can read a great deal more detail on their website.

All I would say is that a service like this is only going to become more and more useful as more people sign up and offer/accept lifts. Right now it seems that journeys between the big cities are the most common ones available but if you commute locally every day, why not put this journey up for others to share? You could charge a small amount every day and recoup some petrol money while reducing emissions and congestion.

Steve (156 Posts)

I am chief writer and editor on Green Steve. Blogging since 2011, I like to delve into a wide number of topics to help people reduce their carbon footprint. You should follow me on Twitter here. And add me to your Google+ circles here.

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