I recently attended the excellent New Adventures in Web Design conference, at which almost half of the 600 attendees had arrived by car. It seems to me that such large numbers should present an opportunity to reduce the number of car journeys generated by such an event.
Conferences aren’t just about the speakers, they’re just as much about meeting people—old and new friends—it’s just about unheard of for a web design conference not to have an after-party, and they often sport some fringe social events too. So, if we’re all keen to mingle and socialise, why wouldn’t we want to start beforehand, on the journey there, and save some CO2, travel expense, and road congestion while we’re at it?
Car sharing applications already exist, but they tend to focus on car sharing for work, and other regular journeys. There should be an app that conference organisers can use to set up an official car-sharing option for their event. This could easily hook into a service like Lanyrd to help gather attendees from the same areas.
There should be an app for that.
