<p>This email was sent to faculty and staff…I’m guessing that students will be notified at some point as well.</p>
<p>UA will soon be launching our new private carpool community, Zimride! This social network for ridesharing makes it fun and easy to find friends and colleagues to split the cost of your daily commute.</p>
<p>We’ll be launching the site to the entire campus later this summer, but we’ve invited you to access the site early. We ask that you register with your UA email address and add your commute–then Zimride will do the matching. You can post as the driver or passenger, or say that you’re willing to do either.</p>
<p>Again, to participate in our “sneak peek” of UA Zimride, please do the following:
<p>Zimride is a website where people looking for rides and people looking for passengers - can meet up, discuss details, costs and leave feedback. </p>
<p>It is linked to Facebook and Twitter and also [url=<a href=“http://www.zipcar.com%5DZipcar%5B/url”>http://www.zipcar.com]Zipcar[/url</a>]
a membership based hourly car rental available to UA staff and students</p>
<p>but Zimride just provides a private secure means to communicate about ride sharing, with UA staff and students. Sign in and take a look. UA email account required.</p>
<p>^^^ Interesting to read the behind the scenes politics of the university trying to get the SGA to foot a portion of the Zimride bill. Not sure that I tend to agree with the tone and reasoning of the author, who seems to be saying that the service IS not usable by a vast majority of the student body. I would think that at lease MOST OOS students would be interested in using various aspects of this service IF, and perhaps this is the key, it can be demonstrated that enough people WITH CARS actually look in Zimride to find potential passengers. In that respect, perhaps the university should have funded the first year or so until such time as it could have been shown via objective data to be a benefit to the students, thus warranting a potential cost component coming from the SGA. As for the other comments about failed Zipcar, change in parking rules disallowing freshmen with cars, metered parking, etc., I certainly have no experience to know what the history of those issues are. IF Zimride can offer a viable and reliable source for OOS student to plan for and arrange rides to / from airports, etc. then that would be wonderful, but the proof will be in the pudding on how useful it really ends up being. Right?</p>
<p>I think(?) the writer was asking why buy non-essential services when the University is raising tuition, a common complaint for students who don’t want to see tuition increases while THEY are in school.</p>
<p>gojack … yes, obviously that was part of the message too, and potentially THE reason, as the author suggested, that the SGA balked especially since the proposal was sent to SGA so soon after the announcement of the tuition changes. However, ignoring that, there do seem to be A LOT of other subtext going on especially about parking. And his blanket statement about this service not benefiting the majority of the students is preconceived opinion. However, I still stand by my opinion that since the university does not know, in fact, how the service will be adopted by students and faculty, I do think it may have be too soon to go to the SGA and ask them to pay for a new service that there is no empirical evidence will be successful. Obviously, Zimride in their sales pitch to UA can produce stats on how other universities have done after adopting their system, but there is no guarantee that it will be widely adopted as a viable service at UA. Perhaps they should have negotiated a trial period paid for entirely by the university before approaching SGA? IF it could be shown / proven to be valuable, then the spend is more justified … otherwise, it’s just a whipping-post item to use against maintaining expenses within current and future budgets.</p>
<p>There used to be a five dollar cab ride for Bama students to the Amtrak and other nearby places that was offered before our rising sophomores were students. We heard of it from older kids that were attending Bama while our kids were in high school. Kids from our area made a lot of use of it for rides to Amtrak and the grocery, and we were looking forward to using it ourselves. Unfortunately, by the time we got to campus in the Fall of 2010, the service was no longer available. Zimride will help fill the need left vacant by this now defunct system. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it is a short lived program as well.</p>
<p>I remember reading about the $5 cab rides to anywhere in Tuscaloosa, though I think it had gone up to $7 by time I started attending UA.</p>
<p>I’m really hoping that the Sunday shopping shuttle to Midtown Village, University Mall, and Super Target will continue and possibly be expanded to Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club.</p>