Money Saving TipType: Advice
Expiry: Ongoing
Find out whether you could cut the cost of your commute by car sharing.
What's the deal?
With the price of fuel shooting through the roof travelling anywhere by car is becoming increasingly expensive. Because of this more and more people are finding that the spiralling cost of their daily commute is noticeably shrinking their take home pay.
Car sharing is a great way to reduce this financial load as you can split the cost of getting to work with a travel companion whether or not you drive yourself.
How do I benefit?
www.carshare.com is a good place to start looking for a travel companion as is lists all the car share schemes currently operating in the UK.
Once you've found a scheme operating in your County (or City depending on when you live) you'll need to register your interest. This will simply involve entering information such as your journey route (usually just the start and end destination), how frequently and at what time you plan to travel, whether you are looking to drive yourself or get a lift with someone else and how flexible you are in terms of journey times. You will also need to enter your name and contact details.
After you have registered with your local car share scheme a list of suitable journey matches will be displayed and you will have the option to contact any of the individuals whose travel route and times match your own. After this it's down to you to arrange and manage your car share and hopefully make some big savings on the cost of travelling to work.
Conditions
It's usually free to register and search for a lift share, however you should expect to split the cost of each journey you make with your travel companions and it will be down to you to decide how much you contribute/your passenger contributes towards the cost of fuel.
There is no obligation at all so if you decide at any time that car sharing isn't for you it won't be a problem.
You will be responsible for your own safety when you car share and it is worth familiarising yourself with the safety guidelines that most car share schemes display on their website. These include meeting in a public place and checking your travel companion's id.
