PickupPal Blog

Eric has blogged about this issue: trust/stranger/feeling safe…In my mind, there is no way to be 100% sure that someone you are interacting with, who you have not known for a certain amount of time, is a “safe” person (for lack of a better word). At work, at the grocery store, at the park, at Uni, driving in the other car on the highway, sitting next to you on the bus, at the movies or at the symphony for that matter, we are surrounded by people we do not know. We all decide individually what we feel comfortable doing and who we feel comfortable interacting with, sometimes even talking to. We make choices everyday based on a whole series of individually-set criteria to go in one direction or another, or to do one thing and not another.

Ridesharing is not for everyone. But I think it works for a lot of people whose criteria for making the choice to share a ride with someone are met within the PickupPal community model. There are a series of tools that PickupPal provides to meet a number of these criteria (not all, but some)…
Tools such as:

• member profiles with photo
• gender preference matching
• in-system messaging
• post-ride feedback/evaluation
• five-star rating
• drive/ride statistics tracking
• community support with like-minded people
• people going to the same event/concert/festival

So with these tools to satisfy some criteria, and other personal decision-making criteria, that members may have, being met by such things as telephone conversations and /or pre-drive meetings, a lot of people (Pickuppal members) are perfectly comfortable to accept or offer rides with others members going the same way.

It is a challenge to support people to trust others and feel safe with others. And we at PickupPal, would never presume (or even try) to convince a person to trust another solely by virtue of the online community that we have created. What PickupPal does is offer a box of useful tools for its members that may (or may not) help inform their decision regarding sharing a ride/drive, it does not decide for them.

We are challenged as a society and at PickupPal to understand the trust relationship. To understand what makes another person a “stranger” (and strange/not trustworthy) and what needs to happen for someone to go from such a “stranger” to a person who you just may not know, but is worthy of your trust. What is our default position as a society? These are very interesting questions and to understand them and address them is, as I said, certainly challenging but also inspiring… At least to me.

-Suesan

Well what a week!

To kick things off we had an awesome article in the Toronto Star, (Here), front page Business Secton. A huge thanks to Tyler Hamilton for writing such a great article about PickupPal! So now that it is out there and we have seen the final product - there is a massive relief. Tyler is not some easy push over - he calls it the way he sees it and I was not sure what the article was going to be like at all before it was published. It turns out he likes what we are doing and that means a lot to us because he does not suffer fools gladly.

In any event the purpose behind this post is to showcase the craziness of making things look easy. I just had to post this picture from the photoshoot because we had to pretty much run around in traffic for 20 minutes without getting killed to get the right shot. The photographer - Bill Grimshaw - was awesome to work with. We had this shot of us almost getting hit by on coming cyclists and cars and it is totally real - John wanted me to get to the curb and I thought it would be best if I book’d it across the street to the other side. You see John and I are just a bunch of grown up kids - doing something we really love and having fun with it all.

For more press this week - John is going to be on GlobalTV at 8:30 a.m. on Friday May 2nd. They are covering PickupPal and we are excited to see how it all turns out.

Cheers - Eric

Try this one on:

Halloween + Candy Apples = Ruining it for everyone

O.K. so I will admit that is a really weird thing to talk about in the Spring and just an odd statement in general - however hear me out. If you grew up in North America as a kid any time after 1967 you know that taking homemade candy from strangers at Halloween was enough to make your parents Freak OUT! The needle in the candy apple syndrome - all those kids harmed because of crazy loaner neighbours and compounded by parental negligence. However you have to have a little context here -we are talking some 20 million kids at Halloween with many years of not a single incident of this occurring - some of the highly publicized cases turned out that it was either a parent or an uncle that was the culprit by either intentionally tampering or a child coming across his uncles heroin stash and mistaking it for candy and overdosing. Now I am not saying that this is trivial - any harm to a anyone is a horrible thing - however my argument is this - what was the end result of this fear? Our perception of our neighbours changed from one of trust to one of suspicion. Ohh the Milford’s down the road they have those crazy teenagers - you can’t trust them - throw out the homemade cookies. This then leads to what we have now - you really can only give candy made by a known manufacturer and is sealed in a wrapper - if you don’t well it will be thrown out - even if you put your name/number/and credit card number on your homemade packaging. This is great business for candy companies - this fear is awesome - one that needs to be kept up because it is great for the bottom line. However I feel it has been a big contributing factor in the deterioration of our communities and our sense of safety amongst our neighbours. When you start to fear your neighbour your community no longer feels safe and safety is very much in the eye of the beholder.

Still not convinced then let me if you will spin this around and take a look at Swimming pools:

• A swimming pool is 14 times more likely than a motor vehicle to be involved in the death of a child age 4 and under.
• Each year, approximately 1,150 children ages 14 and under drown; more than half are preschoolers (ages 0-4).
• Each year, an estimated 5,000 children ages 14 and under are hospitalized due to near-drownings.
• Of children surviving near-drownings, 5-20 percent suffer severe and permanent disability.

(Source - Swimming Pool Safety)

O.K. I have nothing against swimming pools - really I don’t - however when a child goes over to a pool party do Parents Freak OUT!? As if they are playing Russian Roulette with a Gatling gun? Nope. But why not? Because it is swimming pool - fun and sun and all that - sure there are risks but hey man life is filled with risks. Who gains by people fearing swimming pools? Now I don’t have a tinfoil hat on my head and I don’t think that the candy manufacturers are perpetuating the fear of Halloween - however I do think that there has to be a balance here. Halloween is still one of my favourite times of year and it has this cloud over it of worrying about what my kids are eating and if it is safe and if I can trust my neighbours and that quite frankly is just not a good thing.

So this is my dilemma - why is it so easy to fear our neighbours and believe the worst in people and conveniently do it in the name of safety even if the numbers don’t add up. Clearly based on the statistics you really should just fill in those killing machines we call swimming pools for the sake of the children. I am fascinated by how we learn to trust others and why we have found ourselves in a society of fearing our neighbours and what is the root cause - I am going to keep digging here so expect more on this topic.

Cheers - Eric
P.S. I know - what does this have to do with PickupPal? It has everything to do with PickupPal - Fear and Safety are huge issues and I want to figure out how we begin to trust one another.