Dickinson’s subscription to RidePost, the ride sharing website for members of the Dickinson community to coordinate carpools to and from campus, has been cancelled after two years due to low participation and high operating fees. With only around 480 participants, the $3,000 annual contract was no longer regarded as a valuable investment for the college, said Lindsey Lyons, the assistant director of the Center for Sustainability Education (CSE).

Lyons suspects that Dickinson students arrange carpools through their own means and was not certain that the practice was made more popular by a designated website.

“Dickinsonians like to do their own thing. I do think students were sharing rides on breaks; they just didn’t need [RidePost] to make it happen. It may have initiated a lot more rides than we know about, we’ll just never know. I do think we are doing an okay job of sharing rides and not driving long distances on our own” said Lyons to explain why Ride Post was not as successful as the college originally hoped it would be.

In 2013, based on the feedback from the Climate Action Task Force, CSE led the effort to create a ridesharing network for both students, faculty and staff. Since then, the college has signed two one-year contracts with Ride Post.

In 2015, RidePost was acquired by the company Ride Amigos. Lyons said that Ride Amigos was willing to honor the college’s existing contract with RidePost but she and other administrators at CSE were hesitant to make the renewal.

“We used [the Ride Amigos buyout] as a point to say, ‘Is this a valuable investment for the college?’ We could look at how many people have signed up for an account, which was about 706, which is pretty minimal over two years” said Lyons, who participated in the decision process to cancel Dickinson’s subscription with the ride-sharing website.

According to Lyons, there are several grassroots efforts to create new platforms for sharing rides, but CSE has shifted its attention from student carpools to the faculty. Several faculty members have reported to commute 80 to 100 miles one way. Lyons herself has to travel a total of 66 miles to get to and from work, but in the two years that the website was up, she was never matched with a rider.

“[CSE] and Human Resources is talking about organizing meet and greets by communities for faculty and staff commuters. We could have one for Newville, Shippensburg, Chambersburg…. The only way you can know if you can find someone to ride with is to meet those people,” explained Lyons.

Lyons also believes that there are other initiatives that could take place in order to motivate the students to share more rides. For example, the money that was spent on RidePost could be used for drawings each month for those who participate in ridesharing. If the prizes were $100 gas cards, the college would spend $1,200 annually, as opposed to the $3,000 that it was spending on Ride Post.

Lyons said: “My plea [is] are there students interested in taking an active role in pushing the college to come up with other ways to incentivize ride sharing? I don’t think we need to pay for a third party subscription; I think that there is a way that we could do this internally with Dickinson social media.”

Students with ideas for new ride sharing platforms should reach out to Student Senate ([email protected]) or contact Lindsey Lyons at CSE ([email protected]).

Correction: The Nov. 19 article “CSE Cancels Subscription to Ride-Sharing Website” misstated the cost of the college’s annual contract with RidePost. The college paid $3,000 per year for their contract, not $6,000. In addition, Dickinson’s RidePost account had 706 members when it was discontinued, not 480 as originally stated.