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LEADIN The carpool craze has reached the Middle East. Dubai start-up Carpool Arabia is hoping to help cut congestion by convincing people to shake-up their daily commute. STORYLINE Anyone who's visited Dubai knows traffic is bad. The Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) estimates there are one million registered vehicles in the UAE - that's one for every eight people - so there's bound to be some traffic issues. This is the daily commute in Dubai. Cars sit back to back on the highway. But one entrepreneur is taking advantage of the congestion. Benjamin de Terssac is the founder of Carpool Arabia, a new business venture which he hopes will help ease Dubai's traffic chaos. It's a company which encourages people to 'carpool,' or cut down on the number of vehicles in a commute by sharing lifts. Here he is speaking at the 2014 Arabnet Digital Summit - an annual gathering of digital businesses in the Middle East. He had his light bulb moment during his own commute to and from work. "When I came to Dubai, I was living in Dubai and working in to Abu Dhabi so I was commuting everyday 250 kilometres back and forth," he says. He realised that many of the cars on the road had only one passenger - usually the driver. "And I felt there should be another way to commute to work. Bus is pretty inefficient. Taxi is a little too much expensive and there is no train so I decided to start a carpooling service and use something that is very successful in Europe and in the US for the Middle East market." de Tarssac says carpooling is not a new concept in the Middle East, but up until now it's been a fairly casual network between friends. "Sure there is a lot of education to do. Carpooling is not new in the UAE. A lot of people do carpool by using their mobile phones and they call their friends and colleagues and see if they can arrange a carpool after work or to go somewhere, he says. People can sign up to the Carpool Arabia website for free and can then opt to make a donation to offset the price of the ride. The start-up is still small with only 300 users, but de Terssac says more and more people are joining up. Launched in February 2014, Carpool Arabia is now his full time job. de Terssac is confident the company will continue to grow. "But by using Carpool Arabia, it is easy to scale and see suddenly who are all the people who are in your office who you don't know who are living in the same area. So it is going to be successful here so long that we respect the local culture." The local culture has in the past been weary of carpooling. It was illegal in Dubai until 2008 because it violated some cultural and religious norms of the region that prohibits Muslim women from travelling on their own. Six years later, the RTA in Dubai is now encouraging carpooling and announced a trial run of a "pool vehicles project" on one of Dubai's busiest highways, Sheikh Zayed Road. de Terssac says he'll give women the option of female-only carpooling to work with local customs. Here some of Carpool Arabia's new recruits leave Dubai's 'Internet city' to go home. Guillaume Arnaud is a co-founder of Carpool Arabia, but today he is a driver for two colleagues. Shreyas Ravishankar is a new user to the website and believes that this could catch on in the Middle East. "I think it is a pretty catchy concept now right because carpooling is just about getting from one place to another," he says. Thinking green is also a reason to sign-up he says. "There is also this environmentally friendly aspect to it and a lot of my friends are into that so they find it is a pretty cool idea." Local authorities in Dubai and Abu Dhabi already monitor air pollution and as the UAE's population grows, they say they will continue to do so. You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/8ec7b3ac1dbd582a75cfaf3e87396435 Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork