Riding free-riders ? A study of the phenomenon of BlaBlaCar in Italy

The chapter analyses the case study of BlaBlaCar, which is a for-profit online platform offering carpooling services to connect people who need to travel with drivers who have empty seats. The carpooling offered by BlaBlaCar partially constitutes an act of contemporary collaborative consumption (CCC) because despite the brokerage company involved, which should lead us to count this practice of consumption among typical sharing economy activities, some of those involved in the ride sharing feel they are part of a community that advocates an alternative way of life to the classic model of private car use. Our empirical research has been carried out to understand the meanings and practices within the ‘social world’ of BlaBlaCar users. We investigate the evolution of carpooling to understand whether and how users’ carpooling experiences fluctuate over time. To reach these goals, we conducted 70 semi-structured interviews with people between 18 and 35 years old who had interacted with the collaborative platform at least twice. All the users involved in the fieldwork lived in the Veneto region of Italy, and the data were collected in 2015. We used the ATLAS.ti software to elaborate on the data for content analysis. The most important result of the research is the clarification of the relationship that drivers establish with the figure of the ‘stranger’.