Ellington

Students and faculty now have a new option for planning their commute to campus with the ride-sharing program UW Zimride, but some students are having a difficult time arranging rides through the site.

Zimride is an online ride-sharing service that connects commuters within a community, allowing them to offer or ask for rides. It isn’t a new concept; though UW Zimride recently launched for the UW Seattle campus, it has been in effect at UW Bothell since October. Calvin Johnson III, UW Bothell transportation coordinator, said that the service has been successful and he’s heard positive response from students about it.

Celeste Gilman, transportation systems manager for UW Commuter Services, said that the launch of Zimride for UW Seattle attracted more visitors in a shorter amount of time than any other university on the website: more than 2,000 in the first few hours.

“We have broken a record for Zimride,” Gilman said. “On average, each ride post is getting 13 matches, so any person who wants to ride has options.”

Leo Lam, an electrical engineering graduate student, doesn’t commute to campus, but he said that he has found Zimride useful for onetime trips.

“I have found someone [to carpool with] every time,” Lam said. “I think it was a great idea.”

Yet some people haven’t been so lucky.

Daniel Haskell, a civil and environmental engineering graduate student, was interested in using the website to save money and time in his commute from Tacoma three times a week. Haskell, however, hasn’t yet been able to find somebody to give him a ride through the program.

“I have contacted everyone with a message that our rides sync up on Zimride, but no response,” Haskell said.

Kate Crowe, a graduate student, also hasn’t found Zimride helpful because of differing schedules with those in her community interested in sharing rides.

“It seems most people coming from my neighborhood hold 40-hour positions [at the UW], and my schedule is that of a grad student — erratic,” Crowe said.

The amount of people who actually get rides from the service is a hard number to measure.

Chris Hoffer, a UW Evans School student who worked with the UW as a part of the Environmental Management Certificate Program to create Zimride, said that there isn’t an answer to that question just yet.

“We’ve had just over 4,000 people sign in, and over 1,000 posts,” Hoffer said. “So that would be about one in four people posting a ride. However, I’m guessing a lot of people just signed in to see what the site was all about.”

Hoffer said Zimride will be doing a survey soon of users to assess if their posts result in rides and, if not, why.

Although some users haven’t had luck with it, Gilman said that she thinks Zimride was a good project for the students to take on because it could be launched for the Seattle campus quickly and Zimride is a service that has been used successfully at a number of universities.

“They were looking for a project they could work on that would have a lasting impact on the university campus,” Gilman said.

Hoffer said Zimride will help the UW community lower its carbon footprint.

“We definitely see the environmental benefits because over 20 percent of [people commuting to] campus drive single-occupancy vehicles to campus every day,” Hoffer said.

Hoffer said that the online program also offers a “level of trust” that other carpool services don’t because it requires a UW NetID to gain access to the website.

Gilman said UW Commuter Services is excited about the launch because she thinks it eases the commute for students and faculty.

“This adds a great option for the campus community,” Gilman said. “It’s very easy to use.”

Reach reporter Sarah Schweppe at news@dailyuw.com.