NuRide promotes carpooling by offering rewards to commuters

by Heather Hayes
for Virginia Business
September 2006

Turns out that being green can actually be easy and profitable. Commuters in the Washington, D.C., area can cut their gas bills and do their part to save the environment by simply logging on to a Web site and arranging a shared ride to work. If the commuters do it often enough, NuRide Inc., the Reston-based company that created the system, will compensate them with gift certificates, gift cards and other rewards provided by local corporate sponsors. “We’re kind of like Expedia for ground transportation, only with a little eBay thrown into the mix,” says Rick Steele, the CEO of NuRide, which has 14 employees.

The ride-sharing service is free to commuters, who are recruited through their companies. They earn “redeemable” miles for each ride-sharing trip. The system even allows “NuRiders” to rate ride-share companions and post comments.

The concept was created by Steele and four other IT entrepreneurs (including John Milliken, a former Virginia secretary of transportation). They believed that the Internet was the key to overcoming the limitations of carpooling, which has been declining since the 1970s. Carpools generally involve the same people taking the same daily trip. “We felt that people needed a flexible system that they could use once a week, once a month or whenever they felt like it and with different people on different days,” says Steele. “Ultimately, we wanted it to be as easy for them to share a ride as it was to drive alone.”

The idea appears to be working. Since starting in the Washington area in 2004, NuRide has expanded to New York City and Houston and has a total of 16,000 commuter members and more than 60 corporate sponsors, including Chevron, Austin Grill, Old Navy and TGI Friday.

To encourage even more participation from both commuters and sponsors, NuRide has undertaken a number of highly publicized “road races.” In February, for example, company officials kicked off the Chevron 5,000,000 Mile Rideshare Challenge in the Washington area in hopes of eliminating 5 million miles of unneeded trips and 2,100 tons of emissions. As of July 1, Steele says, drivers had already logged 1.4 million miles.