Swiss traffic jam, autoroute, 2009: doubling up might help

Update 16:25 Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Paleo Festival Nyon is well and truly over for this year, and we all had very good fun. The festival’s organizers tried even harder this year to encourage public transportation, as GenevaLunch described in its users’ guide to the festival.

Among those efforts was Klaxonne.com, an experiment in “dynamic ride-sharing“, bringing together demand and supply for a ride to a certain place at a certain time, using text messages or sms. Klaxonne was moderately successful at Paleo.

It received a total of 280 offers of rides and 388 bids. As a result, it organized 120 car-pooling arrangements over the course of the six-day festival. Compared to the almost 40,000 daily concert-goers, this is a drop in the bucket. But consider this: Klaxonne’s two-person team started only four months ago with the jazz festival at Cully, with a budget of CHF 80,000. The cost of the Paleo operation was CHF 20,000.

Lausanne-based Klaxonne’s director, Pierre Crevoisier, told GenevaLunch that car-pooling arrangements are beginning to take off. From its beginnings at Cully in April until now, Klaxonne has received almost 2,000 messages and organized 250 car-pool arrangements. He emphasizes that this is nothing in terms of potential supply and demand, but the team is continually working on the system to improve it. Limitations today include its current restriction to Swiss mobile phones and the algorithm’s inability to combine a demand for transport at point A with a supplier at point B to go together to point C. He said the sms system on which the current technology is based is a limitation in itself.

The biggest restriction is the critical mass of users necessary to make it a viable transportation possibility. Other systems such as Ireland’s Avego.com are struggling with the same issues, Crevoisier said. The advantages of a mass transit system anywhere is its reliability. No one wants to spend more than a few minutes a day organizing travel plans, so the system has to be flexible and available, perhaps using late-generation smartphone technology incorporating GPS. At Paleo, for example, Klaxonne’s presence was limited to a single screen at one of the reception tents. The network effect, by which an increasing number of users increases the value of the system for each user, makes a big difference in the service’s usefulness.

Crevoisier says that Klaxonne’s plans for the future are to provide the service during the Dalai Lama’s visit to Lausanne, and the Schubertiade at Payerne, canton Vaud, in early September. Klaxonne is gearing up to provide the service to the Unversity of Lausanne and EPFL (Swiss Federal Polytechnic Institute) at Lausanne. He is also considering the business aspects of the service, he said, since Klaxonne has been providing its services free of charge to the festivals’ organizers.

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