The Gap That Gave Rise to J-Pool

Structuring the everyday journeys that connect us.

A colleague offers you a lift home after a late shift. It works. It saves you forty minutes and a wait in the dark.

The same shift comes round the following week. The same colleague drives the same route at the same hour. Neither of you mentions it, because neither of you is quite sure the other was planning on it. You get the bus.

Nothing went wrong. Nobody was let down. That is exactly what makes it so difficult to fix.

The movement is already happening

Every community has a rhythm. The early shift, the campus run, the volunteer session on a Thursday evening. Our lives are defined by familiar routes and recurring schedules, and yet our daily movement is treated as a collection of isolated journeys.

One person drives to work alone. A neighbour waits for a delayed bus heading in the same direction. Colleagues text each other for a lift when they happen to think of it.

We call this informal movement: the naturally occurring flow of people within a community, driven by everyday routines rather than formal transport planning. It is the lift after a late shift and the parent covering the school run.

Informal movement is genuinely valuable, and it has one serious weakness. It depends on coincidence. It works when the right two people happen to be in the same conversation at the same moment, and it disappears completely when they are not.

The people are already there. The seats are already empty. What has been missing is a structure that does not rely on chance.

What the numbers actually show

Across Scotland, from Aberdeen where our early pilots are taking root to wider regions, we remain heavily reliant on cars. In 2024, driving accounted for 51 per cent of journeys, with a further 12 per cent made as passengers. Around 73 per cent of Scottish households had access to at least one vehicle (Transport Scotland).

Put those first two figures side by side and the shape of the problem appears. For every journey made as a passenger, roughly four are made behind the wheel. Most cars on most routes are carrying one person.

That has consequences beyond congestion. Transport accounted for 33 per cent of Scotland’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2023, and cars were responsible for 39 per cent of those transport emissions, which Transport Scotland puts at 12.9 per cent of Scotland’s total emissions.

Better use of existing vehicle capacity will not solve that on its own, and we will not pretend otherwise. But a system where four seats travel empty for every one that is filled has room in it.

Built for connection, not just transactions

When I began developing J-Pool at Eykegai with my co-founders, we did not set out to build another open ride sharing marketplace. We started with a narrower question:

How can we help communities make better use of the movement already taking place within them?

Answering it meant changing the language. A person making a journey with spare capacity is a Host. A person joining that journey is a Pal. Together they form a Pool.

Those Pools sit inside communities, and we use that word broadly on purpose. A community can be formally constituted, with members and a register, or it can be informal: the people on the same rota, the same estate, the same Thursday evening session. What matters is not whether a group has a legal structure. It is whether the people in it already have reason to recognise one another.

The terminology is deliberate, because the words we had available were wrong. Driver and passenger describe a service. Buyer and seller describe a transaction. Neither describes what actually happens when a colleague waits five minutes so you can finish locking up. J-Pool is built around participation within verified networks, not around a commercial exchange between a driver and a customer.

A shared ecosystem of value

Value for the community. A community here might be a university, a hospital or a large employer. It might equally be a shift cohort, a volunteer rota, a faith group, a sports club, a residents’ association or a set of neighbours on the same estate. Some are formally constituted with a membership list. Others are simply groups of people who already recognise each other. For any of them, how members travel affects who can turn up, how reliably, and at what cost, and for larger bodies it affects parking pressure and environmental commitments too. J-Pool provides visibility into recurring movement patterns, which lets a community make better informed decisions about mobility and collective impact. Most currently have no idea how their people arrive.

Value for the Host. The journey is happening anyway. J-Pool lets a Host make available seats visible within a trusted network and connect with Pals whose routes align. It offsets daily running costs and turns a solitary commute into something more useful, while the Host keeps full control over schedule, route and availability.

Value for the Pal. The benefits are practical, financial and social. It offers a reliable alternative when public transport does not match a shift pattern, or when travelling alone is expensive. A Pal is not stepping into the unknown. They are coordinating within a verified community. J-Pool does not aim to replace buses, trains or active travel. It adds a layer of coordination for the journeys those options do not serve well.

A structure built around real behaviour

We are not asking anyone to invent new movement patterns, and that is not a stylistic preference. It is what our research told us.

When we surveyed people while building the MVP, more than two thirds said they already share journeys regularly or occasionally, most often with family, friends and colleagues. They coordinate it through WhatsApp threads, phone calls and conversations in corridors. The behaviour exists. It is simply invisible, unrecorded, and impossible to rely on if you are not already in the right group chat. Read what else that survey told us.

So we begin with what is already there: the journeys people already make, the groups they already belong to, and the routines that already shape their weeks.

We did not see a lack of transport options. We saw a lack of structure around how people already move together.

That is the gap. It is why J-Pool exists, and the pilot in Aberdeen is where we find out how much of it we can close.