Duluth Rideshare Board?

Would Perfect Duluth Day be interested in hosting a rideshare board for trips that go beyond the bounds of Duluth (like to the Twin Cities and back, etc.)? It would sure be helpful for one-car or no-car families that have to travel regularly. The UMD Ride Share board is great and shows the concept works, but I’m not a university student and it feels kinda weird showing up for a ride as a middle-aged person when the driver expects a student. And then there’s the summer.

3 Comments

Paul Lundgren

about 8 years ago

Perfect Duluth Day could host a ride sharing board, but I don't think Perfect Duluth Day would necessarily be any better at hosting a ride sharing board than anyone else.
 

Facebook is probably the best platform for it, and there is no reason anyone couldn't start a Facebook public group page just like the UMD one and have it work out exactly the same as it would if Perfect Duluth Day had a role in it or not.
 

But that's just my limited-experience first thought on the matter. Let me know if there's an element to this I'm not considering.

Robert Lillegard

about 7 years ago

I think PDD would do this very well. I am thinking there are a ton of lurkers that rarely post (like me) and would use a board if it existed. For some reason PDD has a higher level of trust than a random Facebook group. It's sort of a third party community meaning there's more of a feeling of accountability. I don't know, I see it as ideal for Emily's idea.

Paul Lundgren

about 7 years ago

One of the reasons I think Facebook would work better is that once a person joins the group that person would get notifications through Facebook that people are looking for rides, increasing the possibility of making a connection.
 

On PDD there would be a page that everyone would quickly forget exists, where people would occasionally comment about needing a ride somewhere. Since few people would notice the comment on the old thread, connections would seldom happen. If it somehow did get a lot of participation, however, it would then become a confusing thread, with thousands of comments and multiple people requesting rides and responding chronologically down the page to various requests at once.
 

That's if PDD did the easy thing and just opened a ridesharing post where people requested rides and got connected in the comments. As an example, write a comment on this page that you need a ride to the Twin Cities on May 27 and see what happens. Nine-tenths of the people who will ever read this page have already read it.
 

The alternative would be that PDD develop a ridesharing sidebar of some sort and put time into developing and promoting it so that it works as well as the simple Facebook group that anyone could start in two minutes. From my perspective inside the PDD brain trust, I don' t think we're willing to put resources in that direction ... resources being already thin with the 10,000 events published annually in the event calendar. 
 

But I'm routinely wrong about things, so if there's an easy way to do it that would work better than Facebook, explain it so a dullard like me will understand.

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