The Atlanta metro area is one of the fastest growing urban centers in the country and, according to the Forbes magazine 2008 ranking, enjoys some of the worst traffic in the U.S. 13% of Atlanta-bound commuters spend over an hour commuting to work, with the average commuter spending more than 60 hours every year hassling their way to work on ever more crowded roadways. Atlanta ranks in the top ten cities for air pollution.

Clearly Atlanta is a perfect opportunity to employ all efforts available to reduce traffic. Heather Pastrick, from Enterprise Rent-A-Car’s Atlanta operation, recently explained how one important component of those efforts consists of the 110 vanpools (and growing) provided by the Enterprise Rent-A-Car Rideshare program throughout the greater Atlanta metropolitan area.

Read more of this story »

The ridesharing website PickupPal (as reported in a previous post) was struck down by a Canadian court in a case brought against them by bus giant Trentway-Wagar. The company took PickupPal to the Highway Transport Board complaining that the ride-matching service fell afoul of the province’s obscenely strict ride-sharing laws which were adopted in the 1970s.

Sit down, these rules are crazy (it’s like those crazy sodomy laws no one follows):

• You must travel from home to work only - nowhere else!
• You cannot cross municipal boundaries
• You must ride with the same driver each day
• You must pay the driver no more frequently than weekly

The issue is not only that PickupPal’s site allows drivers and passengers to connect for carpooling. While it is up to the users to determine compensation, apparently the site “does nothing to check on insurance, roadworthiness of the vehicles, driving history, or anything else.” This worried the Highway Transport Board most.

As we all know that carpooling or public transport can lead to things like decapitation or movies like Speed - no one wants that. So the court ruled that PIckupPal owes CAN$2,836.07 to the province and another CAN$8,500 to Trentway-Wagar.

But Trentway-Wagar says its beef was simply that it is unfair they have to meet labor, environmental, and equipment standards to haul passengers around when services like PickupPal can arrange rides without doing any of that. Hey, I can get behind that (insert sodomy joke here).

And while your inner-hippy might be annoyed by this bump in the road, know that small (and totally unlicensed) businesses have developed around websites like this, and Craigslist. And it’s these illegal ventures that have led to serious tragedies in the past.

Image: Mr. T in DC on Flickr under Creative Commons