The thing about useful stuff is: Ontario carpooling restrictions -

Ontario carpooling restrictions - Wednesday, November 12, 2008

You can only gasp in amazement at the story here about the ruling handed out by an Ontario court to a web start-up designed to assist people to carpool.

No matter that Ontario allegedly wants to encourage carpooling on environmental grounds, it seems the transport companies who were behind the action think that making carpooling harder for people will shift them out of their cars onto public transport.

The PickupPal blog sets out the Ontario restrictions, which brought them into Court:

The only way you can ride with someone is if you meet ALL of the following extremely impractical set of specific criteria:

You must travel from home to work only – (Not Home to School, or Home to the Hospital or the Airport)
You cannot cross municipal boundaries – (Live outside the city and drive in – sorry you cannot share the ride with your neighbour)
You must ride with the same driver each day – (Want to mix it up go with one person one day and another person another day – no sorry cannot do that – must be same person each day)
You must pay the driver no more frequently than weekly – (Neighbour drives you to work better not pay her right away just in case she drives you later on in the week)

Unbelievable.

However, it appears even the Ontario Govt recognise the lunacy of the situation and appear to have begun the process of changing the rules.

Sadly services like this don't eliminate the concerns people have about accepting a lift from strangers, which is probably the biggest deterrent to greater take-up.