The last decades have seen a sharp decline in traditional socializing in rural Ireland due to a number of factors, one of the key ones being the drink-driving limits. The large towns and cities you can get a range of public transport seemingly unlimited taxis are in stark contrast to smaller towns where you may have to rely soley on taxis, and they may be in short supply. In these situations, in order to socialize, many people would have pay double to get in and then pay to get home again – just to have a few drinks and while that may put people off doing it too frequently, the killer is not being able to guarantee that you can get a lift back.
This rural transport deficit is forcing people to do their socializing at home, which isn’t really what many people are used to and it can increase isolation to many members of our rural communities.
Solutions
Over the past decade this problem has gotten worse and social isolation has increased. There are various echo’s of different schemes but nothing viable has surfaced. We can either continue to wait out until someone else brings some form of incentivized transport system or .. we can drive for a community-led initiative that can bring a viable solution to bear. What if we could use community resources, ourselves to give lifts in a fair way to help us solve this problem – how could we organize these resources to help bring people out of their homes a bit more often? How can we make this as seamless as possible and as fair as possible so that people feel empowered and not encumbered?
There are several key factors that we would need to being a solution to bear here.
- The heart of this solution is the community and we would need people to be willing to push for something better
- As a backbone, we need technology to help manage how this would work seamlessly
- We then need to the ability to explore and hone the solution to the needs to exact the community or group (e.g. bridge, bars, bingo, mass or markets, pilates or pubs!)
Well, we now have the technology to support this kind of initiative and its being developed buy a new transport community called LiftCoOp who are giving rural communities the opportunity to increase their transportation network.
What is LiftCoOp?
You can read more about the company at www.liftcoop.com, but in summary, LiftCoOp is a community based transport cooperative Smartphone App that allows connected groups of people to cooperate and organize themselves to provide drives for each other. No money changes hands between drivers and passengers. When you drive another group member you get credits (called Meitheal‘s ) for giving that lift and when you get a lift you “spend” the credits that you have earned – The app does everything from booking, to driving, to managing your credit !
Launching a Pilot!
It’s as simple as that – or is it? Would this really work in rural communities? The answer is – ‘we don’t know‘ and we won’t know unless we give it a try. The development of the transport platform including smartphone applications has been ongoing for over 9 months and the company is now ready to launch the solution across rural communities in Ireland but there are many unanswered questions about how people would use this?
- What is the ideal number of people that would make this work?
- How should people work this?
- What kind of basic courtesies be in place?
- What would a successful outcome be? Again – it depends on how you measure it – it the number of lifts, the number of Meithels?
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- Is it more people going out more frequently (which could have a knock on effect)?
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- Is it some of our more isolated members of communities getting to go out?
There are more question than answers so as part of an innovative social experiment LiftCoOp has agreed to do a pilot project in Gort so see how this would work.
The first LiftCoOp pilot project will launch in Gort next week and we are looking for a group of 30 locals coming together to trial the technology over a three month period.
If you are interested in this then please contact Niall on 086-2853886 or visit the facebook pages / and leave a message.
South Galway Vision 