Have you heard of International Ridesharing Day? It's this Friday! To meet the occasion, Francesca Pick talked to initiator Mattias Jägerskog about this initiative and the growth of ridesharing worldwide!On Friday October 4th you celebrate The International Ridesharing day for the fifth year. What exactly is it and what have you done on this day in the past years?
International Ridesharing Day is a worldwide celebration of environmentally friendly travel that you do together with others! You can share boats, trains, buses and cars - as long as your share these vehicles with others. Five years ago we celebrated the first ridesharing day by travelling with public transportation and eating candy in the small town of Örebro, Sweden. It's great to see now that the initiative has spread across the whole world! This year Ridesharing Day is being celebrated in Belgium, England, France, Germany, Mexico, The Netherlands, the United States and Sweden of course. Some things we have done in the past for ridesharing day is organize concerts, hand out free apples to commuters, sing special self-written songs and create our own bus lanes. How did you have the idea to start Ridesharing Days and how can people participate? I came up with the idea for a Ridesharing Day right after I started the Swedish ridesharing movement Skjutsgruppen.
I wanted to create an event that emphasizes the idea of travelling together in an environmentally friendly way and is easy to take part in.
Anyone can participate by simply sharing vehicles and connecting around the world with the hashtag #RidesharingDay, the web page ridesharingday.com and this Facebook event. Swedes who participate can also win 700 Euros to invest in projects that make the world a better place (projects of their own or others). Tell me more about Skjutsgruppen, which has become the biggest ridesharing movement in Sweden. How did the movement get started, and where does it stand today?I started Skjutsgruppen when I was a media- and communications student in 2007. Back then it was more of a social experiment: we experimented whether we could find people to rideshare with through social media. So friends invited friends who invited friends to a very simple Facebook group. Our main idea was
If people tend to be afraid of people they don't know, we can solve this with good communication. We can solve this by talking to each other.
And social media has shown to be a good tool to talk to each other. We just passed 35 000 users and launched a new website this summer - www.skjutsgruppen.nu. We're currently growing by almost one thousand new users every two weeks. How popular is ridesharing in Sweden in comparison to other countries? Where (in which countries) do you think ridesharing works best, and why? Ridesharing is much more popular in southern Europe than up here in the Nordic countries. The main reason for this is a lack of economic incentives, so it’s a steep learning curve in Sweden. It’s hard to say where "ridesharing works best", but among many examples I really like what specific towns have done with high-occupancy vehicle lanes in New Zeeland, Australia and the US. I think combining these with special stops for ridesharing are a very good way for towns to go that want to reduce traffic and improve their citizens environment.
From your experience, what is the best way to convince someone who has never rideshared to try it? If someone has never rideshared before, they're in for a treat! There are thousands of great stories of the social aspects of ridesharing, such as spending time with people you may never have met otherwise. I would just say: Go ahead and try it, and you will have the experience of a life time! What do you think needs to happen for ridesharing and other forms of peer-to-peer mobility (such as peer-to-peer carsharing) to become more broadly adopted? When it comes to the broad adoption of ridesharing, I think there are a number of aspects that need to be worked on. At Skjutsgruppen, we look a lot at attitude change, which is an everyday process. The Sharing Economy community often refers to the concept of "access over ownership", which is a good concept to use when trying to change attitudes, because it helps us gain a more fundamental understanding of the function of traveling. Another important change that needs to happen is that both public services and individuals needs to make their data openly available and combine them with each other. In Sweden this is already partly the case, meaning that when you do a search on Skjutsgruppen you get search results from all forms of public transportation (buses, trains, boats etc.) as well as private citizen’s vehicles (sometimes they put up boats and buses as well). When we view ridesharing from this perspective, people don't need to come to our specific website to find rides - they can access the information from anywhere. This brings me back to the term I mentioned before; "access".You are an active member of the OuiShare community, were a volunteer at OuiShare Fest and are now helping us grow the OuiShare community in Scandinavia. What was it about OuiShare that convinced you to get involved?OuiShare is a great community that is very caring and loving. It’s members do not only express this with words, but show it in their everyday practices by spending a lot of time talking to, hanging out and living with people (some OuiSharers stayed with me and my friends in Sweden a couple of weeks ago). This way of living the Sharing Economy with your whole body is a movement, and a way of living. I'm looking forward to the second OuiShare Fest next year! Thanks Mattias! And have a good Ridesharing Day!