Car-sharing forums - where are they all?

CHINA WATCH A recent NBC news podcast reveals that Californians are embracing an online means of co-ordinating car sharing. Each shared car keeps a number of other vehicles off the road, thus cutting both congestion and pollution.

As it happens, there are also car-pool websites in China: Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Wuhan and several other big cities all have their local car-pool websites.

On one of the Shanghai let’s-share-taxi bulletin boards, there are about five posts a day looking for “car-mates”. As might be expected, car-pooling websites seem to work best inside a certain community, like a college or a company, where people don’t have to share with complete strangers. This Greenbanger is one fo them: I recently put up a post to find someone to share a taxi home with me.

Cheaper and friendlier – just what we like…