The way we get to work is shifting
How commute is a shared ride waiting to happen
For employers in the Netherlands the daily commute is a growing part of what they're expected to measure and report on and one of the few parts of their mobility footprint they can influence directly, without new infrastructure or asking employees to change how they already travel.
By Marvin Pupping, founder of Slinger
Every weekday thousands of employees drive to the same office parks and business districts, often from the same towns, on the same roads, at the same time. No new trip needs to be created. The car is already going there.
Slinger doesn’t ask “how do we get people to the office?” It asks a narrower question: how do we make the cars already going there carry more than one person?
Why this is on the agenda now
Dutch regulation caught up with this in 2024. Companies with 100 or more employees now have to report every year on how much CO2 those employees produce simply getting to work and back. That applies to Dutch companies and to the Dutch offices of international employers alike, wherever the head office happens to sit.
Many of those same organizations are also tracking a broader number for their own international reporting, usually because of a sustainability commitment or a request from an investor or customer further up their supply chain. Employee commuting sits inside that number too. In practice, both figures often come from the same underlying data, just reported to a different audience: one to a Dutch authority, the other to investors and customers.
Here’s the part worth sitting with: none of that reporting reduces a single kilogram of CO2 on its own. It only shows how big the problem is. The organizations that get ahead of this are not just measuring their commuting footprint. They are looking for something that actually moves it, without asking employees to give up their car or waiting years for public transport to catch up.
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What sharing the ride actually delivers
- It’s more enjoyable. A commute with a colleague beats a commute alone, and it turns dead time into something social before the workday has even started.
- It lowers costs, for both sides. Employees split the fuel cost of a trip they were already making and usually keep their commuting allowance on top. Employers offer something extra without a new line in the budget.
- It reduces CO2, measurably. A solo commute produces roughly 137.4 grams of CO2 per kilometer. Shared with one other person, that drops to about 68.7 grams (Dutch National Travel Survey 2024). Slinger calculates the real savings per organization from the actual number of occupied seats, not an average guess, so the numbers hold up in a report, not just a pitch.
Those numbers are worth having. But they are not really why this works.
Why the social part is different here
Most ridesharing platforms match you with a stranger: someone going the same way, found by an algorithm, on an open marketplace. Slinger works differently by design. The person in the passenger seat is a colleague, someone who already shares the same employer and the same workday.
That single difference changes more than who is in the car. It removes the trust barrier that keeps a lot of people from carpooling with a stranger in the first place, because the group is closed and made up of people they already recognize. And it turns a routine commute into a small, recurring moment of connection, a conversation that has nothing to do with a meeting or a deadline.
It’s a strong social experience hiding inside something as ordinary as getting to work, and it’s also why organization-based carpooling tends to see far more repeat use than open, one-off matches between strangers ever do.
How it works in practice
Setting this up does not require new infrastructure or asking employees to change how they already get to work. An organization creates a private, closed group inside the Slinger app, visible only to its own people, never the open public.
- Employees join through a CSV upload from the admin, a shared sign-up link, or by requesting access from inside the app themselves.
- Colleagues can invite colleagues, kept within the organization’s own domain.
- A dashboard shows shared rides, CO2 savings and member satisfaction in one place, the same numbers used in the section above, ready whenever a report needs them.
This is what bringing people together looks like in practice: colleagues sharing a ride to work, because it’s easier, cheaper, and simply nicer than driving alone.
If you would like to see what this could look like inside your own organization, feel free to reach out to Marvin Pupping, founder of Slinger.
Sources. The WPM reporting obligation is described on the official government page, Reporting obligation work-related mobility of persons, RVO.nl. The commuting emissions comparison is drawn from the Dutch National Travel Survey 2024. Slinger-specific figures reflect the company’s own records.