Mat Watson's column

This week Mat ponders car-sharing schemes

Auto Express Car Reviews

By Mat Watson

21st November 2007

What a waste of money! That’s what I thought when the Highways Agency proudly announced it had started work on the UK’s first motorway High Vehicle Occupancy (HOV) lane. It’s spending £3.95million of taxpayers’ cash on the harebrained scheme in West Yorkshire. When the road opens next spring, it will link the southbound M606 near Bradford to the eastbound M62 towards Leeds, to bypass the busy Chain Bar Junction. But only motorists carrying passengers will be able to use it. And their reward for being socially responsible, environment-saving, congestion-busting drivers? Eight minutes’ reduction in their journey time.


	I tried car sharing once. My friend was always late and we argued about routes and radio stations. It wasn’t worth all the aggro

Bring out the bunting – the country’s transport chaos is solved. Only it isn’t. Who on earth will go out of their way to offer someone a lift just to save a measly eight minutes? Not me, that’s for sure. One of the few good things about driving to and from work is that it’s a rare moment of solitude. I don’t want my mornings ruined by some passenger wittering on about what happened on X-Factor at the weekend. So eight minutes is hardly going to convince me to become a quasi taxi driver.

But I wonder whether car sharers will make even this saving. Unless they work and live in the same places as their ‘lift buddy’, I doubt it. Surely they’ll have to go out of their way to pick the person up and drop them off? This takes time. In fact, it will probably outweigh any benefit of getting to drive in your own special little lane.

I know, because a few years ago I tried car sharing with a friend. We lived only a few roads apart and worked at the same place. It seemed ideal. It wasn’t! She was always late, which meant I was constantly kept hanging around. We often argued about which route was fastest and what radio station to listen to. Believe me, the minimal cost saving of sharing wasn’t worth all the aggro.

So if it’s tough car sharing with a friend or colleague, what would it be like giving a lift to a stranger? Various Net-based notice boards put possible poolers in touch. But you can’t be sure of who you’ll get. Imagine pulling up outside a Web contact’s house to have a Hannibal Lecter lookalike climb into your motor. All you can do is hope he’s already had his breakfast and doesn’t want a lift to where nobody can hear you scream!

And things could be just as scary when your car buddy picks you up. What if they’re worse behind the wheel than Maureen from TV’s Driving School? What if their vehicle has only one Euro NCAP safety star? What if they like Radio One? Are you willing to gamble just so you can use a special lane and save eight minutes? I’m not.

Now don’t get me wrong – car share lanes do have their place. I hear that in some parts of the US they’re quite successful. But that’s a different country, inhabited by a different species of human being. First of all, Americans like to talk. A lot. They probably see car sharing as an opportunity to tell their life story to someone new; someone who can’t get away because they are trapped in a moving vehicle.

Also, the US is so huge that, in relative terms, ‘pooling’ will add little to your total journey time. I visited Wendover in Utah last year and was chatting to a chap who described himself as a “local”. Turns out he travelled in from Salt Lake City. That’s about the same as commuting from Birmingham to London each day. When you’re driving this far, it’s not such a big deal to go a few miles out of your way to pick someone else up.

And that brings me back to my original point. In compact Britain, car share lanes are a waste of money. They simply won’t encourage enough people to change their travelling habits to have a real effect on congestion.