Valentines Day Lowest for Carpooling Searches

Valentines Day Lowest for Carpooling Searches

On Valentines day there were just 112 searches worldwide on Google for key-words associated with carpooling, compared with well over 600 searches other days this year, and an average of 430.

Commercial carpool operator, Trip Convergence Ltd, (TCL) developer of the HOVER Flexible Carpooling System, says that it needs to be aware of the changing levels of interest in carpooling.

One way of tracking this interest is to monitor the number of times certain search words are used in Internet search engines such as Google.

Having started monitoring this information only in January, Paul Minett, CEO of TCL, says it is too soon to draw any conclusions. However, by starting to develop the data series he expects to be able to observe the impact that external shocks such as changing costs of motoring (hikes in the price of oil) have on interest in the low cost mode of transport.

The data series, shown in the graph as the average daily number of searches each week, has grown from 375 in the first week of the year to 454 last week. Interestingly the lowest day so far this year was Valentines Day with a total of just 112, and the highest was May Day at 1504.

Asked to comment on the extremes of Valentines Day and May Day, Mr. Minett suggested that “people probably had other things on their minds than searching for carpool information on Valentines Day, and perhaps sharing rides is consistent with the traditional labour May Day message. But we’ll have to wait until next year to see if there are real ‘Valentines Day and May Day effects’”.

The company has developed and patented a revolutionary system that makes carpooling a flexible daily choice for getting to work and back. “The technology available today makes our system possible in ways it wasn’t a few years ago”, said Mr. Minett. “Unlike other systems, HOVER doesn’t require the use of cell phones, nor internet based matching processes.”

The system is described in a short video on the company’s website, www.hoverport.org. According to the information on the website the technology has been developed and system software is in the testing phase.

The company is seeking locations for ‘beta testing’ “anywhere in the world”, according to Mr. Minett. He has traveled to a large number of cities in the past year alerting them to the opportunity.

ENDS

© Scoop Media