Blog The Zimride

This is a great piece covering Zimride’s Carpool Across America trip. The day it aired, the term ‘zimride’ ranked #5 on Google’s Hot Trends.

Saturday, July 26:

We left Las Vegas on Thursday after observing what appeared to be a bizarrely quintessential American Dream complete with money, power, and sex, all in the most unlikely natural landscape: the desert. Redeeming the weirdness was our waitress at a delicious Mexican restaurant who told us about her experience carpooling with her two children from Michigan to Las Vegas earlier in the year along with a stranger to save gas money. This reminded us of the great benefit of a company like Zimride, which ensures you know enough about the person you will be carpooling with to create a mutual trust even before you meet them. Because it employs the social networking profile system, you can go as far as choosing a person to ride with who likes your type of music.

The drive from Las Vegas to LA was tough: the driver’s smacking themselves to stay awake, the filmmakers frantically logging and cutting footage for the next day which included an 8:30 call time with ABC World News. The ABC producers requested not only an interview with our team, but also 20 minutes worth of clips from our trip. With 9 million viewers, Ben and Trevor decided it was worth the discomfort of staying up most of the night compiling footage.

Friday’s interview went smashingly, and we then picked up Margaret’s friend and Zimrider Lien to talk about the vast quality of life improvement that comes from carpooling, as opposed to driving alone, to her job at the Getty Museum. We all then went to a delicious dinner and met two Zimriders Casey and Craig who will be traveling to San Francisco with The Change We Seek.

Saturday morning, the team said goodbye to green gal, Margaret, as she flew (air travel now seems so boring now) back to NYC to return to her “real life” of eco-journalist. After a few SF interviews, the rest of the team will be doing the same Sunday evening: Trevor and Ben to movie making in LA; Cristina to studying Economics in her final year at the University of Seville, Spain; and John to scaling Zimride from his new Palo Alto office with partner Logan.

But, the time spent crossing the US and meeting young green entrepreneurs will not soon be forgotten, nor will the footage be misplaced. In fact, we all look forward to reliving the experiences vis-a-vis a bomber documentary to be released next year and submitted to film festivals, as well as further adventures, local and cross continental, carpooling. As long as communities are formed in vehicles, among new friends with common goals and destinations, The Change We Seek will forever continue.

Yesterday at Facebook’s f8 conference we were announced as a recipient of a grant from the fbFund. In short – this means big things for Zimride, and you can expect a lot of product improvements in the coming months. We also got a great mention during Ben Ling’s keynote. We’ll link to the video as soon as it’s up.

A huge thanks Cat Lee and Julia Lam at Facebook for helping us get here, and for being awesome to work with.

Official Press Release

Wednesday, July 23:

Denver was awesome: interviews with 1)Marriott, 2)a conservative young law student at University Colorado, and 3)a biodiesel dude. After hearing a corporate POV, we then heard from a 24 year old, politically conservative Tyler Martinez, who gave us a great flip-side opinion on the green debate. He believes in Change, but because he isn’t convinced of man-made Global Warming, he thinks people shouldn’t be told to make change, instead they should want to do it on their own.

On the way out of Denver on I70 we stopped by Golden, CO to meet Ryan from Blue Sun Biodiesel company cultivating agricultural oil for diesel energy. Just as Mr Diesel designed the diesel engine to run off peanut oil but was later beat out by cheaper petroleum oil, now that gas prices are so out of control, biodiesel is a cheaper and greener option. Also to note, as we were leaving, Ryan noted how tired we were and offered that we could stay at his house that night. A sincerely kind and generous offer, but we had to get to Utah.

We arrived at Moab by night, the drive there dramatic as hell. In the morning we stopped by Arches National Park, with its gorgeous rocky mountains of burnt orange and red, impressing us all.

Now we are off to Las Vegas, the complete opposite of this pristine natural wonder: an artificial man made spectacle for an evening of debauchery and fun. We are hoping to snag some great interviews with people on the strip and if they think about all of the energy use?

Thanks Marriott, from the Zimride Team

We want to give a huge shout out and thank you to Marriott for providing us with lodging as we stop in 8 different cities during the filming of Carpool Across America. Marriott’s generosity is overwhelming and without their support, we would not be able to Zimride across America. Furthermore, their environmental initiatives rock and show great leadership in the hotel industry.

To see more about Marriott’s sustainability commitment, check out this video featuring Ed Begley Jr called Marriott Meetings Go Green.

Monday, July 21

We left the Windy City yesterday in the late afternoon after Ben and Trevor finagled some incredible shots driving under Chicago’s El train. Using a camera mounted on the car’s hood, they were able to capture the essence of our daily activities (driving) and then make us check to make sure we had sufficient equipment insurance.

On the beach at Lake Michigan, we scooped up Zimrider Joe who was Couchsurfing for the week in Chicago. Couchsurfing offers travelers a free place to stay and like Zimride, creates trust between previously perfect strangers using online profile information and social networking platforms.

Joe is from Lincoln, NE and knew Iowa and Nebraska as well as our previous Zimrider Mike knew upstate NY. And so he expertly guided us to the World’s Largest Truck Stop on I80 in Iowa, complete with an arcade, movie theater, food court, etc. There, we interviewed truckers and fellow travelers on gas prices (some big a** trucks need about $1200 dollars worth of gas each time), the environment, and Change. Everyone spoke about Change.

We arrived in Omaha at 3am, under a mega dark, elongated cloud that Ben insisted was a tornado, and drove to the home of a good friend of Trevor. Jim was kind enough to put us up, and in the morning we met the with the Omaha Metro Rideshare planners who told us about carpooling solutions coming from local government.

We are now off to Denver to stay at a Marriott, for the third time in the trip as they are one of our fab sponsors, and in the morning we have an exclusive interview with them regarding their green initiatives.

Zimming down the road…

Cristina drives the Honda

Trevor films The Change We Seek while always thinking about Batman…

Sunday, July 20th:

Driving into downtown Chicago last night at 2am felt fantastic for reasons that go way beyond the obvious. Here are a few of the others in no particular order:

1) We picked up Zimrider Simon from the Detroit Metro Airport and allowed him to save him a ton of money by not having to fly to Chicago. He in turn, gave us an Austin, Texas perspective with a London twist as he lives in the former and is from the latter.
2)We finally went to the movies in Detroit to see The Dark Knight (INCREDIBLE!!) which was filmed in Chicago, making our arrival feel like we were actually in Gotham City. The overwhelming feeling that we were kind of in the movie actually prompted Trevor to accurately copy The Joker (RIP Heath Ledger whose electrifyingly scary performance def deserves a posthumous Oscar) and freak Margaret out.
3)Whilst in Chicago aka Gotham City we will be going to Barack Obama’s National Headquarters which come to think of it feels a bit like Wayne Mansion/ The Dark Knight’s Batcave.

Cheers to the Chi, and getting back on the road to hit Omaha, Nebraska a little earlier than 2am…

We want to give a special thanks to Zipcar for providing us with the Prius Hybrid for Carpool Across America. Zipcar has been incredibly generous and encouraging of us during the planning of this trip. We love everything they are doing and appreciate their support!

We made it! To Canada, that is. Last night at the very tired hour of 10pm as we were approaching Detroit in hopes of reaching the new Dark Knight film at 10:30pm (Trevor can’t contain his urge to Batgasm, nor talk about the latest Batman film every 22 minutes) we actually crossed the damn border to be greeted by a customs official. In his Canadian accent (don’t you know you’re in Canada, ay) he told us we had to cross back into the US, prompting Ben to have a mild panic attach, Cristina to explain why she was driving with such bad American navigators (”I just found them on the road…”) and delaying our Detroit arrival a bit. Ah well, the joys of road-tripping with a faulty GPS system.

Earlier in the day, back in Cleveland after interviewing the green collar job folks, we picked up another Zimrider and college buddy, Matt Dietz. We interviewed a nurse, Veronica, who as a single mother was volunteering her time and efforts to canvass the neighborhood on behalf of Senator Obama and Change. In her free time, which she could be spending with her son, or making money with a side job, she stressed to us on camera and off, how she was volunteering to avoid the regret she’d feel post-election if she wasn’t part of the movement.

At a gas station, we overheard the most interesting conversations between pissed off drivers and the station’s attendants. “It’s $3.88 per gallon down the road and here it’s $3.98. Why are you guys trying to cheat us?” and “I have a $10 but please fill up only $5 dollars worth so I have $5 left tomorrow. ” One attendant asked to come with us on the trip, but he couldn’t leave his job, so we left and continued on down the road towards Detroit via Canada (?!)

Zimriding down the road…

Yesterday, Thursday July 17th, after a solid 6 hours of sleep, we all left Jen and Arthur, John’s sis and bro in law’s lovely home by the Finger Lakes of Ithaca to meet Rob Young. Prof Young was John Zimmer’s green mentor and professor from Cornell who is currently working at University Oregon on alternative energy solutions and nano-technology applications. Following a smashing interview, we headed to RPM Ecosystems where Marv Marshall and his daughter Taylor explained their patented process for cultivating rapid growth, super strong trees. whose success rate of of 90% (as opposed to 20% for other trees) is helping to restore the Mississippi River Basin Area post-Katrina.

After the nursery, we got back on the road to get to Buffalo, in time to meet legislative assistant Jason Kaza, friend of Zimride passenger Michael (London School of Economics grad and Rochester High School History teacher.) In front of a magnificent room with great acoustics and Margaret frantically asking if she could rap the gavel and begging everyone to address her as “Madam Chairwoman”, Jason presented John with a resolution. The plaque officially declared July 17th, 2008 Buffalo, NY Carpool Day and thanked Zimride for all their hard work in promoting alternative transportation.

Next Jason took us the city’s cavernous and bizarrely abandoned Central Train Station, which Trevor kept saying was perfect for “I Am Legend II” (his mind works in a movie kind of way.) The strangely unused facility with SO much potential instigated a lively conversation among the group about our generation’s lack of community which mass transit automatically creates and how important car sharing will be for rebuilding that community feel.

We had some Buffalo wings, like the real ones, for dinner, and drove three more hours to Cleveland where we arrived loopy as all hell from exhaustion (John, completely delirious from lack of sleep) where Marriott Hotel had 3 complimentary rooms waiting for us, a list of their green initiatives in tow, and goody bags (plastic, but beggars can’t be choosers) with snacks and sustenance.

This morning, Friday July 18th, Margaret, Trevor, and Ben let John and Cristina rest whilst they drove into Cleveland to meet up with A Piece of Cleveland who goes to home demolition sites, takes the would-be landfill material and reuses it for beautiful modern furniture. Major shout out to Chris, Ezra, and Aaron (and PJ who we didn’t meet) for their great work.

Our meeting was arranged by Kelly from Hard Hatted Women, an organization training women with green collar skills, who work with companies like A Piece of Cleveland, to raise out of positions of economic despair. Great interviews with her people at one of their demolition sites, whose wood will be recycled for other homes and furniture.

Now we are picking up another Zimrider and hitting the road to Detroit to see what the Motor City has to offer 5 idealistic kids…