Car Free Day Helps To Cut Down Emission Levels in Hyderabad
HYDERABAD: In a span of seven months, sRide, the official carpooling partner of car-free Thursday was able to save emission of nearly 14,000 kg of carbon dioxide. All thanks to the IT crowd, who are convinced to ditch their cars and share a ride with strangers.
sRide, an intra-city carpool app, has an active user base of over 78,000 users, of which 36,700 belongs to Hyderabad. Through carpooling, it has covered over 55,000 km and carbon-di-oxide reduced is equivalent to planting 663 trees.
Nitin Chadha, director of the company, said “Hyderabad has its own share of traffic problems but it is not as bad as some other cities like Delhi or Mumbai. We are strong believer of the fact that we need to take some action in Hyderabad in terms of traffic management before it’s too late and Hyderabad also has to take stern steps like NCR. Carpooling is one solution that does not require any additional cost or investment from government and the benefits can be multi-tangential from traffic, pollution reduction to reduction in parking problems for corporates. It also gives people an opportunity to interact with others in their neighborhood and company in a time when everyone is very busy running in their lives,” he said.
When asked whether Hyderabad should follow the footsteps of Delhi and implement odd-even rule, Chadha said, “From operational point of view odd-even rule is hard to be implemented, it needs people to monitor. Whereas carpooling is easy to implement and is the best tool to reduce pollution and solve traffic woes as it require no additional infrastructure. Nearly 5 lakh car users hit the road everyday and if we can get at least half of them to carpool, pollution should come down. It would be better if people realise and opt for alternative measures before the government mandates and implement something like odd even rule,” Chadha added.
“When compared to other Apps, sRide is user-friendly and easy to manage. You get an instant message when some one accepts your ride request and there is no need to keep looking at the app for every two seconds. Also, most of the users are verified users, so there are no security concerns,” Rahul Basu, an employee of CA Technologies, said.
sRide is currently active in Hyderabad and Pune and has maximum number of corporate verified users.
Apart from this, it was recently launched in Delhi to support odd-even policy.
Total number of rides completed 4,853
No of carpool users in Hyd 36,700
CO2 saved (in kg) 13,932
KM covered while carpooling 55,729