Toulouse: how the fuel shortage is boosting carpooling
The fuel shortage is pushing motorists to adopt changes. Some are turning to carpooling to get to work.
In front of the few service stations which are not out of stock in Toulouse, uninterrupted files of motorists wait nearly an hour to be able to stock up on fuel. The shortage, caused by a strike in the refineries, forced some Toulouse residents to compensate for their trips.
In recent days, carpooling has been on the rise. A trend that was observed when the price of fuel exploded a few months ago. On the Karos platform, the leader in carpooling based in the Toulouse metropolitan area, with approximately 1,000 carpooling trips per day, the number of new carpoolers has increased by 44%.
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“With the fuel shortage, we have seen a significant uptick in both registrations and carpools. At the national level, we had 35% more registrations this weekend and a 44% increase in new carpoolers at 8 a.m. on Monday. In Occitania, the number of subscribers on our platform has increased by 72%. The greatest increases recorded are in the Toulouse urban area,” says Karos, who works with major employers such as Airbus, ATR, Safran, Sopra Steria, Latécoère, La Poste… and which has 20,000 registered people in the Toulouse metropolis.
Is traffic on the ring road more fluid?
Its competitor, BlaBlaCar Daily, the carpooling application for daily journeys, is also seeing an increase in the number of carpoolers. “While more than a third of service stations are now affected by the shortage of gasoline, many French people are looking for alternative solutions to get around or avoid waiting files at the pump. We have recorded a 25% increase in carpooling searches on our application”, specifies BlaBlaCar Daily, who adds that in Toulouse, the trend is analogous to the national trend.
According to many Toulouse residents, traffic on the Toulouse ring road has been less dense in recent days.
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Françoise, who takes the ring road daily to get to work, assures us that “it’s like being in the middle of August or during the Covid-19, when we were confined”. According to her, the carpooling boom would explain the drop in traffic “Perhaps teleworking also plays into it”, supposes the Toulousaine.