Hi, it's me, Zach, again. My friends Dee, Maggie, Tommy and I love soccer, but we love the environment, too. Clean air. Clear water. Beautiful nature. And we want to preserve it. One way we are committed to doing that is by telling everyone we can how traffic contributes negatively to the environment.

The Problem

You see, each time a vehicle is driven it produces pollution. The more pollution, the dirtier the air. We want to encourage everyone in our neighborhoods to think of other ways to get where they are going. Can you ride along with someone else? Can you walk or bike instead? Do you even need to go in the first place? Have you thought about riding the bus?

When we want to go somewhere, we automatically jump in a car. We rarely stop to think about what we are doing to our environment by simply driving. We want to change that. And we are asking for your help.

The Solution

My friends and I started our own carpools to school, soccer, and after-school programs. Maybe you can do the same. We even put all our adventures together in a book, "A Day on the Go: Making Smart Choices with Zach and His Friends." Well, we needed a little help from the good people at RideShare.

RideShare is a program of the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission in Charlottesville, Va. RideShare educates commuters and students throughout Central Virginia about how transportation affects the environment and encourages alternatives to driving alone.

In the past, they mostly reached out to adults, but they decided to talk to children as well. And that's where we come in. We'll be drivers someday, probably sooner than our parents would like. In the meantime, we can start making changes now that will cause our transportation habits to be different in the future.

Take Action

Spend some time with us and see for yourself. Play some games, read our information, and get to understand the problems that traffic can cause for the environment. Make your own promise to help reduce traffic and to clean up the environment. We did, and you can, too. Even if we are just a bunch of kids!

To supplement the material found in RideShare's educational workbook, "A Day on the Go: Making Smart Choices with Zach and His Friends," we provide a list of frequently asked questions, resources and an overview of this website. Visit the Parents & Teachers section for more details.