A ridesharing idea by way of Tech Tuesday

An internet resource for understanding the need to reduce CO2 emissions is:

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c1/page_15.shtml

    You will have to rejoin the separated lines of text to make your browser go to the website above for the book Without The Hot Air by David J.C. MacKay.

    Here is an easy way to cut the CO2 emissions of Coastside cars: Use ride sharing to reduce the car miles driven.

Make ridesharing work much faster with electronic tags on cars and cell phone numbers for calling drivers and riders and positioning data available from some cell phones.

  A ride share involving 1 rider and 1 driver could approach 50% reduction in CO2 emissions due to half as much driving.

  Meanwhile at the last Tech Tuesday I happened to talk to a fellow who is a professional cell phone application programmer.

    I asked this fellow, "Will a cell phone allow an application where an incoming call to the telephone will trigger the phone to read it’s global positioning system sensor (some phones have these sensors) and answer back by telling the longitude and latitude of the cell phone?

    His answer was sort of a "yes and no". But that is pretty interesting, no?

    Now last week, somewhat against my will, I signed up for the FasTrak electronic bridge toll system.

    The interesting thing about FasTrak is your registration includes your cell phone telephone number.

    Another interesting thing is, it is possible to set up an electronic toll tag reader device at places other than bridge entrances. In fact, such reader devices are used at present to measure the speed of free way traffic.

    So here is the exciting possibility: All Coastside traffic is funneled through just a few roads. Put a toll tag reader on each of the outgoing highways leaving Montara and Half Moon Bay.

    A ride sharing service could use toll tag data to find groups of Coastside commuters going in the same general direction.

  From that point, using the cell phone numbers linked to toll tags, then ride sharing associations could be discovered.

  Another interesting capability provided by the electronic toll tags is transfer payments or credits from rider to driver for the ride. Ride sharing could have a compensation arrangement built into the electronic facilitation process.

  An attractive place to locate a ride sharing parking lot is the Highway 92 former Nurseryman’s exchange and former Half Moon Bay park site.

  Other transportation ideas I have been studying are in my blog:
http://lessco2essay.blogspot.com/