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Is your daily car drive to office and back pinching your pocket? While you could switch to much cheaper public transport modes, you may prefer not to hop on to crowded buses and trains. In such cases, try carpooling. This offers a good alternative for those who want to reduce their commuting cost but at the same time enjoy the comforts of travelling in a private car.
In carpooling, you team up with office colleagues or other individuals travelling on the same route. This could be in your own car or in different cars, by turns, if other group members have their own vehicles. You could join a carpool, even if you do not have your own car. Web sites such as carpooling.in and carpoolsindia.com help users find or create suitable carpools in major Indian cities.
Carpooling helps cut down your expenses. Taking turns to drive also reduces the stress of negotiating tough traffic and bad roads everyday. Besides, by carpooling, you do your bit for the environment by reducing road congestion, emissions and pollution.
Cost savings
From a financial perspective, your most obvious benefit from carpooling is the substantial savings on fuel cost. Say you have a petrol car and travel around 40 km to office and back each day, for 22 days a month. At current rates of petrol (around Rs 73 per litre) and assuming mileage of 13 km per litre for the car, you will be spending around Rs 60,000 annually on fuel. Carpooling with one, two or three more persons could translate into an annual saving of Rs 30,000, Rs 40,000 and Rs 45,000. Savings on fuel cost for diesel cars, though lesser than that on petrol cars, will also be quite healthy - in the range of Rs 13,000 to Rs 20,000 annually.
Carpooling in which the group uses different vehicles on a rotational basis results in less wear and tear, and improves the life-span of the car. Even in cases where a single car is used, sharing of the maintenance cost could mean substantial savings. For instance, if the annual maintenance cost of the car works out to Rs 20,000, each person in a carpool of four members would bear only a quarter of the cost - around Rs 5,000. In in cities such as Mumbai, the parking space for vehicles can be quite costly. By sharing this expense among members, carpooling reduces the burden and takes away some of the bite.
Concerns
While it has several benefits, car pooling also has its drawbacks. For one, you lose flexibility on timing, since you have to start the commute at a predetermined time daily. Besides, you may have to put up with group members whose habits may not be to your liking. Also, you may have genuine worries about the security of travelling with someone unknown. Failure or delays by pool members to reimburse travel expenses can also cause problems. So, it is important that you get to know the members and are comfortable with them, before agreeing to a carpool arrangement. Also, make sure that the rules for spending and reimbursement of expenses are clearly laid out and agreed upon by all the carpool members.
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