Service helps students find and share rides

Back in the day, you checked the rideshare bulletin board when you needed a ride home from college for Thanksgiving. At UC Davis and a host of other universities, there is now Zimride, which allows car owners and ride seekers to match up over the Internet to share rides.

“I go to San Francisco a lot on weekends,” says UC Davis student Marsha Sukardi. “I feel guilty being one person in a car driving all that way, so I try to help someone out who’s going to SF too. At first I just tried to carpool with friends who I knew frequented SF, then I found Zimride and have given a few people rides there and back.

“If they chip in for gas or bridge toll, that’s a bonus!” added Sukardi, a graduate student in civil and environmental engineering.

Now in its second year at UC Davis, Zimride was started in 2007. Logan Green, a UC Santa Barbara grad, had just finished a stint in Zimbabwe, where filling a car with riders was a popular way to make a journey. When he returned to this country, Green decided to launch a web-based rideshare program and met up with Cornell grad John Zimmer, another guy with a hankering to make every ride count.

Now at more than 60 colleges and corporations, Zimride came to UC Davis in the fall of 2009 as part of Transportation & Parking Services (TAPS) alternative transportation program.

Network exclusive to UC Davis

TAPS partnered with Zimride to create a social network for ridesharing that is exclusive to UC Davis. More than 1,300 Aggies are currently using UC Davis Zimride.

Signing up is free. Riders and drivers can enter the private, secure Zimride website using their UC Davis e-mail address and post where they’re going.

Zimride users can also check out potential rideshares through the UC Davis network on Facebook. Riders and drivers are under no obligation to accept a rideshare offer.

For car owners, Zimride is a way to share costs — estimated by Zimride at close to 14 cents a mile for a small sedan. Zimride does not broker cost sharing between drivers and riders, but the site does advise participants to negotiate up front issues like cost and rules for the drive.