Ride-Share creates student carpooling
Georgia College & State University has taken steps to help conserve student spending in the future by instituting a Web site designed to get students who are traveling into or out of town in touch with one another.
Students registered to the Ride-Share Web site can post the date, time, and place that they are traveling. They can also post whether they are seeking a driver or passengers. Once the trip is posted, students searching for trips with matching criterion will be able to contact them to arrange any particular specifics they want.
“It works just like E-bay,” said Mazhar Malik, an instructional development specialist for GC&SU’s Web Enabled Resources Department. “It’s a middle man. It just connects one person to another person, and if they want to split the gas money or one person pay or another, it’s up to them. It’s just the medium that we’re providing.”
Currently the Ride-Share Web site only works for GC&SU students and staff. Any students wishing to register will be asked for their Bobcat ID and e-mail address and will be sent a password when their account becomes active. The more people who register for ride-sharing, the easier and less competitive it will be to find someone to ride with.
Jim Wolfgang, GC&SU’s chief information officer, confirmed that the Ride-Share Web site was a direct result of this year’s record-breaking hurricane season.
After receiving a memo from the Interim Chancellor to begin looking for ways to conserve energy due to recent gas prices, various ideas were considered.
“We realized that both our students and our faculty often commute to places. Some students live here and have classes in Macon, and some faculty drive to Atlanta on the weekend,” Wolfgang said, “So we looked at it, and in today’s time where posting a note on a bulletin board just doesn’t work anymore, we thought that a Web site would be a good way to bring people together so that they can share rides and therefore save energy and save money.”
The Web site, rides.gcsu.edu, should be available through the InfoPage. Although currently undergoing internal testing, the Web site is in its final stages of development and will be ready for riders and drivers sometime next week.
Posted by Colonnade Archives
on Nov 11 2005. Filed under News.
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