Overdue Idea: The National Carpool Cooperative Database

THE ISSUE: It’s soccer Tuesday and the clock is not your friend. You jam your daughter into the SUV and hit the gas before your seatbelt’s done up, steering with your elbow in order to hold your disintegrating taco. You burn rubber to the field, which of course is halfway across town, knowing that you’ll be fighting a dozen other parents for the handful of street parking spaces.

You arrive ten minutes late, breathless from the jog from the parking lot three blocks over, only to see the other hyperventilating parents, recovering after making the exact same trip you did.

THE VICTIMS: Unless you live on top of a subway line, chances are you’re spending a good chunk of your week in your car, probably crawling along a packed highway or a road under repair. When kids enter the picture, chauffeur becomes a second job, with sports, birthday parties, school “fun” fairs. Meanwhile, you’re burning through an ocean of gasoline that, if you added up the total costs for the year, would make you cry.

We suffer through this largely alone, locked in our tin boxes, replaying the day’s lost battles in our heads and slowly driving ourselves closer to the pine box that will be crawl in the slow lane on the way to the funeral.

THE FIX: There have been some attempts to use the magic of the Internet to organize carpools, but we need a large-umbrella solution that isn’t just a crowdsourced cab service.

With the National Carpool Cooperative Database, participants planning to use their car would simply input their departure point, destination, and expected leaving time. The database would find matches with people looking for rides, and also look for other drivers making the same trip. So if little Saba down the street is going to the same art camp as your little Hannah, you can share a car with Saba and her dad and deal with only one parking space. Maybe you make a new friend, or at least get some neighbourhood gossip. There are fringe benefits here.

Instead of money changing hands, the system would operate on credits. If you drive someone, you get credits. If someone drives you, you spend credits. Credit deficit is allowed, but only to a point.

(No buying credits. You need a vehicle to have skin in this game.)

Of course, the driver is taking on risk here, letting perfect strangers (and their mucky kids) into the car, so there would have to be some safeguards.

First of all, participants would have to register on the system and show ID to the driver, because we don’t want some serial killer sneaking on and ruining things for everyone.

And for trips longer than, say, 10 km, passengers would have to pay a share of the gas (calculated by the database so the driver isn’t doing math at the destination). And if there’s a toddler involved and he has food, you get a credit because you know that applesauce is going to end up on the seat. Maybe another credit if someone touches the presets on your radio, or starts searching for One Direction.

Anyway, it would totally be worth it.