It’s already the biggest distraction for office workers, who spend their time chatting with mates and “poking” strangers, but now Facebook is encouraging its members to help save the planet.

The social networking site has joined forces with a car-sharing firm that aims to cut congestion and pollution by allowing people to hitch a lift online. The concept is simple: users of Facebook can add an application that will put them in touch with others who have a car and are offering a lift, or vice versa.

Each party can view the other’s online profile, including a photograph and some personal details, before committing to share the journey, and any payment is taken care of online to avoid embarrassing moments on the road. Hitchers can even plot their desired route on Google Maps to show exactly how far they are going.

Robin Chase, the founder of the service, called GoLoco, claims it has the potential to revolutionise travel for environmentally aware young people – especially university students and professionals, who make up the bulk of Facebook users. “Today, with the infrastructure we have, we can do something that can dramatically reduce costs and emissions,” she says. “And we don’t have to wait for governments to introduce carbon taxes or congestion charges to do it.”

GoLoco was launched in America in April, and Chase plans to bring it to Britain early next year. She has form in this area: the car club she launched, Zipcar (whose members hire out one of a fleet of cars dotted around the city for £5 an hour), came to London last year, and she has already held preliminary talks with Nicky Gavron, the deputy mayor of London, about the service and the possibility of adding a GoLoco link to the Transport for London (TfL) website.

In America car-sharing is seen as a key weapon in the battle against congestion, with many highways in large cities featuring multiple-occupancy lanes reserved for cars with more than one person. In Britain the concept has yet to take off, but there are several pilot schemes around the country, in cities such as Leeds and Birmingham (see panel below).

One of the attractions of GoLoco is its simplicity. With road pricing seemingly shelved by the government after more than 1.8m people signed a petition opposing it on the Downing Street website, and the more recent loss of 3m learner drivers’ records by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency compounding public distrust of centralised official control, the idea of reducing congestion by encouraging individuals to share journeys is gaining currency again.

TfL is interested in the concept as a way of easing congestion. This year it has spent £500,000 on improving street parking for shared cars. Ben Plowden, programme director of travel demand management at TfL, is in charge of trying to make car-sharing schemes work in the capital, and says the potential for social networks such as Facebook to provide a point of contact for people who are seeking to team up on travel is enormous.

“It provides an element of social proof,” he says. “You will sign on and see people like you who don’t own a car, who aren’t dyed-in-the-wool environmentalists, but are sharing journeys. People will see that people just like them are doing it. This way, it becomes a part of the lifestyle.”

The environmental benefits are clear. One estimate claims that drivers, as well as saving themselves £1,000 a year by teaming up on journeys, can reduce their carbon footprint by 10% annually. A recent study by Oxford University indicates that people who give up their car on joining a sharing scheme may in effect cut their car mileage by two-thirds.

Certainly, there is a vast number of spare seats on Britain’s roads - according to Halifax car insurance, 38m every day. The trick is finding a way to utilise them.

GoLoco is not the first car-sharing service, nor is it the first to use social networking as a means of connecting people. Isanyonegoingto.com launched earlier this year, and the Norfolk-based www.liftshare.org boasts 200,000 members and claims to set up more than 40m shared journeys each year. It uses an inbuilt social network, MyBUDi, in which members can input planned routes and receive information about anyone going in a similar direction. However, the social networking aspect to this site is basic.

GoLoco’s wheeze is that it has been created specifically to work within Facebook, the UK’s social network of choice, with nearly 8m users. According to research published by Ofcom, the communications watchdog, we spend an average of five hours a month pinging messages to new friends and scouring their pages for new posts. By incorporating its service into Facebook, the company will have a vast captive audience who already spend hours on the site. Chase claims that the huge number of people involved with the site will help GoLoco achieve “critical mass”.

The site also overcomes the prime reason for people’s traditional hostility to car sharing. “Car clubs continue not to blossom, although they’ve been around a number of years,” says Chase. “Why has it not worked in the past? Fear of strangers.”

As with conventional hitchhiking, you could never be quite sure what kind of person might be waiting for you, either behind the wheel or on your own back seat. Bringing the notion of an online social network into a car-sharing service means that users can search for and vet car buddies in as much depth as they might a potential date or business contact.

To sign up for GoLoco, you must be a member of Facebook. Then you can search for the GoLoco application at www.facebook.com/apps and add it to your profile page. You will need to provide additional details, including your home address and postcode, which are not displayed but are required for the system to locate you with the embedded Google Maps service.

Members must also record a voice clip detailing what they had for breakfast. “You can tell a lot about a person from their voice,” Chase says. “It conjures up a huge amount of mental status, education and social status in a way that you don’t get from text.”

Once you have set up, simply post a trip that you take regularly, whether you want to be a driver or passenger, and the level of access you want to afford your trip on Facebook – friends, networks or everyone – and GoLoco does the rest, and pockets 10% of any fee arranged between the sharers.

So what do UK users make of all this? Matt Manners, 26, a marketing executive from Marylebone, central London, is a committed car-club user, paying a £50 annual membership fee for access to a BMW 3-series or a Mini, which he rents for £5 an hour and uses for taking his flatmates on shopping trips or cruising around with friends.

But he balks at the idea of sharing the car with a stranger. “I do like the idea of people clubbing together,” he says. “I often use the car to go and see my folks in Farnborough; I’ve got friends who occasionally go down that way too. It would be a really good idea to be able to let people know I was going and get a few of them along – it’s definitely got me thinking. But I’m not sure about taking a total stranger with me, especially if I met them online.”

Steering us towards car sharing

The revelation last week of another government data-loss blunder, this time the misplacing of personal details of 3m learner drivers, could hammer the final nail into the coffin of a national road pricing scheme, writes Emma Smith.

As Theresa Villiers, the shadow transport secretary, put it: “How can the public trust this incompetent department [the Department for Transport – DfT] with information on every journey made by the 33m drivers on Britain’s roads?”

The government had been cooling on the idea anyway, ever since 1.8m motorists signed a petition against it on the Downing Street website earlier this year. But having announced plans to cut the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions by 60% by 2050 and with congestion estimated to cost Britain’s economy up to £20 billion a year in lost revenue, the government is frantically casting around for new solutions.

Top of the agenda is car sharing. Work recently began on a 1.7mile high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane that will link the southbound M606 near Bradford to the eastbound M62 towards Leeds. The lane will be open to vehicles with more than one occupant, and should be ready by next spring, at a cost of £4m.

Another government HOV trial is planned for the M1 between St Albans, Hertfordshire, and Luton, Bedfordshire. Cities including Leeds, Birmingham and Bristol are also testing their own local schemes and the DfT is considering allowing car sharers to use hard shoulders during peak periods.

At any one time, an average of 60% of cars on UK roads carry just the driver, says the DfT. And according to Liftshare, the UK’s largest car-share company, during rush-hour periods only about one in ten cars has more than one occupant.

The downfall of car-sharing lanes has always been the problem of enforcement. Leeds city council pays for police enforcement of its sharing lanes, but the DfT is looking for a less labour-intensive alternative. The solution could be Cyclops, a camera that uses two frequencies of infrared to identify human skin by the way it reflects light, thereby scuppering the ruse of using a shop dummy as a “passenger”.