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Monday, February 20, 2023 at 11:47 p.m.

The URJC and Hoop CarPool, for university mobility

The URJC and Hoop CarPool, for university mobility The URJC and Hoop CarPool, for university mobility

The URJC university community will continue to reduce energy consumption and the carbon footprint produced by mobility in a private vehicle thanks to the #URJCComparteCoche initiative.

Writing/Raúl García Hémonnet

 

The Rey Juan Carlos University, together with the mobile application Hoop Carpool, founded by Spanish entrepreneurs, is committed to car sharing for the second consecutive year to help its university community.

 Last year, with the collaboration between the university and the mobility app, almost 14.500 kg of CO2 were saved, thanks to the more than 1.100 users who registered in the URJC Community. It is expected that for this new quarter the figures obtained the previous year will be exceeded. Committed to energy saving and the Sustainable Development Goals, the Rey Juan Carlos University is committed to the shared journey platform that contributes to the following three objectives:

 

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As the vice-rector for Quality and Strategy, Andrés Martínez, points out, “Hoop Carpool is a car-sharing management platform open to anyone. However, this collaboration allows URJC users who travel to or from our campus to share expenses through the app without commissions”. Plus, he adds, “regular drivers can get incentives in the form of gas checks. We started working with Hoop Carpool just before the COVID-19 lockdown. Although the mobility of the university community has been drastically reduced since then, the usage data is very promising.” For example, the vice-rector indicates, “between the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, more than 1000 users joined the platform, identifying themselves as members of the URJC, and more than 2000 routes were shared. For this reason, we believe that giving a new impetus to the platform will grow shared journeys very significantly”.

Martínez adds that “universities are places of daily destination for thousands of people, which has a huge impact on urban mobility. Although making our journeys more sustainable is a personal challenge for each of us, institutions can also promote change in various ways”. Of course, he qualifies, “car sharing is neither the only nor the ideal, since non-polluting modes of travel and collective public transport should be favored before, to the detriment of the private vehicle. However, car sharing is a good option to access our campus from areas where the public transport network does not allow it”. "From the URJC we are also currently preparing a Sustainable Mobility Plan to define the starting point and plan the strategies to follow in the short, medium and long term," concludes the Vice-Rector for Quality and Strategy.