Carpooling gets a new dash of green

CAMBRIDGE -- Robin Chase tried to transform the concept of car ownership seven years ago when she cofounded Zipcar Inc., the world's largest car-sharing company. Her newest venture fuses social networking and ride-sharing , aiming to change the way people think about car travel altogether.

GoLoco.org is part high-tech college ride board and part social calendar, with a dash of environmental conscience. The online service -- which went live yesterday, Earth Day -- brokers trips between friends, neighbors, and strangers, then automatically divvies up the cost, the seats in the car, and the carbon dioxide emissions.

"GoLoco: It means go loco -- go crazy, go free-spirited. Go location to location with local transportation. Go low cost. Go low carbon dioxide," Chase said.

For years, people have been trying to figure out how to make carpooling work. The 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments included requirements, later made voluntary, that big employers in some regions increase the number of passengers per vehicle among their workers during peak travel time. High occupancy vehicle lanes offer a way to zip past gridlocked highways. Workplaces offer incentives such as reduced parking fees.

Still, the trend has never caught on. Today, 75 percent of commuters drive alone, according to the 2000 Census.

But Chase is banking that high gas prices and growing awareness of global warming may mean Americans are finally ready to open up their single-occupancy cocoons and share the radio dial through GoLoco. The company is the 48-year-old Chase's next big idea. After stepping down as chief executive of Zipcar in 2003, she founded Meadow Networks, a firm that focuses on applying wireless technologies to the transportation sector.

The GoLoco.org uses the same kind of social engineering that people have become accustomed to on websites such as Facebook.com to increase the number of potential carpoolers, while also offering people a financial and environmental benefit.

GoLoco works much like today's social-networking websites. Travelers set up a profile including languages they speak, the music they like, a short snippet of their voice, and reviews of their driving or conversational skills from past travel companions. They list their close friends and trusted network, then post and search for trips.

Trips are listed, along with the expected amount of carbon emissions, and the cost of the drive -- calculated in much the way businesses use to reimburse employees for mileage. If everyone agrees to the trip, details such as pick up time are negotiated, and the trip costs are electronically transferred from passengers to the driver.

Last Thursday, for instance, five "oLos," as members are called, met in the Brooks Pharmacy parking lot in Davis Square in Somerville for a night of contra dancing, an American folk dance, in Concord.

Mark Chase , 44, an avid contra-dancer, posted the trip on GoLoco last week, as a passenger. (Robin is his sister, and he works as transportation program director at GoLoco.) His girlfriend's co-worker, Luisa Oliveira , 35, a landscape architect who lives in Cambridge who had always wanted to try contra-dancing, noticed the posting when she was searching for trips and decided to join. Her friend, Kim Turner , 31, a landscape architect from Somerville who depends on her car for her commute to Waltham everyday, added herself as the driver. Two others joined.

The round trip from Somerville to Concord was 28 miles, for a calculated total cost of $13.63 using GoLoco's formula. The cost is split evenly, with everyone paying a fifth to the driver through GoLoco accounts -- online accounts that transfer money each time someone gets a ride, to avoid awkward interactions in the car. GoLoco adds a 10 percent transaction fee, or about 27 cents per passenger in this case, which Chase says is enough to support the business, because there are few operating costs for the technology company.

The trip also saved 27 pounds of carbon dioxide -- a primary motivation for many in the group who said they planned to GoLoco on everything from trips to the garden store to their daily commute.

"There's a lot of environmental and economic reasons that it would be great if Americans changed their travel behavior, which at this point consists largely of driving everywhere alone," said Stephanie Pollack , a partner at BlueWave Strategies, a Boston-based environmental consulting group that is not associated with GoLoco. "The core idea, the really powerful one, is that people don't carpool now, but it's not a very easy choice. . . . This gives people two things they don't have when they want to carpool -- choice and flexibility."

GoLoco can work anywhere, but the company is starting with the metro Boston area, partnering with local universities and companies looking to decrease their carbon footprint.

Robert Tuchmann , chairman of A Better City Transportation Management Association, a private non profit organization with members such as John Hancock, Fidelity, and Verizon, said the service has great potential business benefits.

A website that simplified ride-sharing could give people headed to conferences, networking events, or client visits an intimate environment to talk with clients or team-build with colleagues.

Already, Craigslist.org offers ride-shares, and various organizations offer online ride-sharing, but GoLoco hopes to win out over free sites because of its services.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where 20,000 workers and students have access to only 4,800 parking spaces, Larry Brutti , operations manager of parking and transportation, said he thinks GoLoco will boost the number of carpoolers by making it easier for people who do not want to commit to a five-day-a-week.

Today, 26 percent of the people commuting to MIT daily drive alone to campus, and only 7 percent carpool or van-pool. Brutti said he plans to be one of the people to change that, replacing the sports talk radio he listens to on his daily Bedford to Cambridge ride with actual conversation.

Robin Chase plans to add a mobile component, so that a person could walk out of work and use a cellphone to make a deal on the fly, with a driver nearby headed in the same direction.

"When I imagine this future world," she said, "people thinking about car travel would consider that your quality social time."

Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com.