Please carpool, you good folks!

“THERE are too many cars on the road in Kuching.”

We all agree on that. But would you, for instance, give up driving your car?

Not likely, is it?

With the current oil crisis looming – it hasn’t hit us directly yet, but you may be sure it will – people have come up with all sorts of interesting suggestions and solutions.

Alternative means of transport are proposed: some are serious, and some are plain silly.

I love the cartoons of Aussie cops pursuing criminals, both parties mounted on kangaroos, or the ‘fuelling stations’ for various unlikely animals pressed into road transport duty.

Good for a laugh, sure, but nobody thinks that sheep and emu will be a solution to the problem in hand!

I might consider a pony.

The cartoons, and some serious comments, mainly address the fuel supply problem.

But in Sarawak, we still have affordable fuel.

Our problem is the daily traffic jam.

This has nothing to do with fuel availability. Simply, see above, there are too many cars on the road.

A motorist expects to take 10 to 15 minutes actually driving on his journey from home to work.

Another 30 to 50 minutes he spends standing, inching forwards and standing still again in a queue, motor idling quietly so he’s ready when the mass of vehicles moves on another few feet.

Bad for the traffic, bad for the driver’s blood pressure, and let’s not forget it’s also very bad for the environment.

Hundreds of cars, standing still or moving one foot per minute, and spewing exhaust gas.

What does this do to the air quality?

So how do you take cars off the road?

Various ways have been tried in many parts of the world.

In one country, cars with a number plate ending in an even number weren’t allowed on the road on Day 1, cars with an odd number on Day 2, and so on.

This would effectively halve the number of vehicles on the road on any given day.

I never heard how long this system worked, if it worked at all.

I should think there must have been a lot of exceptions from this rule.

We are about to get a magnificent public transport system, which is something to look forward to – in the future.

Right now, I think we should encourage carpooling!

Take the daily traffic jams around schools, and on the way to industrial areas in Kuching like Sejingkat or Muara Tabuan.

Observe that the majority of cars on the way to school have one driver and one passenger.

If a school has 1,000 students, expect to see 1,000 cars heading that way, all at the same time.

Vehicles heading for factories or large offices usually have one person inside, the driver.

That’s just not efficient, not in terms of fuel and not in terms of traffic density.

Carpool, you good folks!

Carpooling is when several people, who live reasonably close together and work in the same place, share one car.

They take turns driving, and pay the driver for the petrol.

There are various ways of organising a carpool, but it will keep cars off the road.

Instead of four vehicles driving from Taman XYZ to the office block where they all work, there’s only one.

Carpooling for school – in America they call it ‘school taxi club’ – works the same way; it just takes a bit more organising.

The parents (mostly the mothers, or a grandparent) who drive children to school don’t usually know each other the way people working in the same factory or office do, but with a bit of effort, they can get in touch.

Obviously, the parents of children in the same class will find it easier to work together; their offspring will have the same school hours, sport, extra lessons, etc.

And this is where modern technology comes to the rescue.

For a group of otherwise unconnected people to communicate daily about details as to what time the footie practice ends, we no longer have to send little notes, or hover anxiously over the telephone.

We all carry a telephone in our pockets – the children who need to be ferried to special art class at 3pm carry telephones too.

This is one of the advantages of dealing with the IT generation.

These brilliant youngsters learned to use a handphone before they learned to use a potty – they know how to keep in touch, how to relay messages.

All that’s needed is a ‘group chat’ for all the persons involved in one taxi club, and you’re off to a fine start.

Instead of four mums driving four children to school, it will now be one driving four children.

Number of cars involved? One – we’ve just got three cars off the road (4 – 3 = 1)!

Of course, I am looking forward to the new age, when we will have MRT (or is it LRT?) with feeder buses into every ‘taman’ and lane in our home town.

Right now, the promised improvements look more like huge building sites, seriously blocking up traffic at every intersection.

But just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, Kuching roads can’t be streamlined in an instant.

We are prepared to suffer in near-silence, looking forward when sleek trains will be whooshing through Malaysia’s loveliest town, making cars obsolete.

Until then – carpool, you good folks!