Saturday, March 10, 2007

We are all residents of Youville. Youville is an imaginary place name for our country home, hamlet, village, town, city or even the world. Youville is the Global Village. It is the place we all call home.

It is my goal here to create a fun place to build something which can be further expanded as input and content is added. I began with an idea which has bothered me for many years. Commuting is something so many of us do and it is getting harder and harder to continue doing as roads become more congested.

How can we get more cars off the roads? Carpooling seems like the obvious answer but it has one big problem. How do I find someone in my neighbourhood who is also going to the same area in the city where I work? I don't know anyone. The solution to this very simple, use a website which can aggregate like-minded people to find a ride. I have thought about doing this for some time but, like so many other people, just got too busy. Now I've noticed that other websites have sprung up.

These websites have one big problem though; they all seem to charge people money just to register. I'd like to find a place which anyone can access for free. In addition to finding like-minded people to carpool with, I imagine that it would be helpful to link to other information in any other city which has the same set of problems for commuters. It should be expandable to include information about traffic conditions in real time. Which cars are best for commuting? Are there good restaurants in this city? Big cities everywhere would get on board by spreading the word. Think of all the money cities will save by not building new roads to replace those torn up by all those single passenge cars. All this, before even mentioning global warming or climate change.

Maybe I can add some thoughts along the way on this blog. What do you think? I'd love to hear what you think!!! Share your thoughts.


Google has some great tools which can contribute to the task of finding carpool people. Google Maps is one tool. I imagine that if we need to find people in my area, Google Maps could locate them for me on a map. Google Maps can be used on handheld devices like Blackberry, Palm, Razr and almost any other handheld device.