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Carpooling

Updated: 7 December 2009

Travelling together with other people is travelling smarter. Carpooling - ride-sharing or lift-sharing - is cheaper, easier and more environmentally friendly than driving alone to and from work. You get to reduce your fuel and parking costs and at the same time you're helping to reduce congestion and harmful emissions.

It may be that your workplace is considering carpooling schemes as part of its workplace travel plans. But if not, you could consider joining an exisiting carpool or setting up informal carpooling with your friends and neighbours.

Getting into a carpool

Various carpool schemes operate around the country. You can look for a carpooling partner in your area through a number of carpooling websites. Here are a few examples.

National sites

Regional sites

Looking for more options?

Try searching the web using 'carpooling', 'ride sharing' and 'lift sharing' as key words.

Setting up a carpool

The main challenge in setting up a carpool is finding other carpoolers - finding people who live in the same area, who have a similar destination.

A sensible first step is to check whether there's already a scheme operating or being set up in your area. You can then team up with the existing scheme to increase your opportunity to find other carpoolers. Read more tips on setting up and running a carpool (PDF, 4.18 MB).

Carpooling resources

We've produced a range of resources to help you promote your carpooling scheme. Whether you're an employer, employee or local authority you can tailor these resources with your own logo and contact details.

You need to know

Some of these resources are large files and may take a while to download. The resources come either with or without trim lines. Choose whichever suits your printer.

  • Carpooling guidelines
  • Brochure for employers
  • Brochure for employees
  • Parking permit (for car pool cars using reserved car pool parks)
  • Parking signage (for reserved car pool parks)
  • Promotional resources
  • Radio advertisements: These advertisements allow a few seconds at the end for you to record your own council's name, website or phone number.
  • Stencil for parking space marking.