Ireland's doctors and nurses are doing incredible work at the moment. What they don't need are long and stressful commutes home. While it's been great to see mass transport infrastructure up and running for medical staff, a bus or a train ride is not ideal for everyone. So it's been inspiring to see a number of great initiatives pop up in the last few days aimed at making commuting free and easy for medical workers.
A brilliant programme was launched this morning by GoCar Ireland and tech entrepreneur Pat Phelan. GoCar provide a car sharing service and they have decided to give access of 100 of their cars to frontline medical staff requiring transport to or from work at any hour of the day. Phelan is looking after the insurance payments for each vehicle.
The beauty of this is that it all came together in about 3 hours over Twitter yesterday.
hey @GoCarIreland how about this, you cover cars for nurses and I will cover all insurance personally, could we make that work?
— Pat (@patphelan) March 30, 2020
looks like have a 100 cars for frontline workers from tomorrow, standby, Amazing @GoCarIreland
— Pat (@patphelan) March 30, 2020
The cars became available today.
In other good news, electric bike company MobyMove are providing free electric bicycles for doctors and nurses in Dublin throughout this crisis. The idea came from Dr Anna O'Leary, who last week tweeted that she was hoping to avoid using the bus during the Covid-19 crisis and was seeking out an electric bike or scooter option.
I'm an emergency medicine doctor who was due to do their driving test in the coming weeks...unfortunately as our times have changed, for the next few months I'll have a two bus commute from my home to the hospital which takes up to 90 mins each way. I was wondering if..(1/2)
— Anna O'Leary (@olearyan) March 24, 2020
...if the beautiful Twitter world out there might know where I could borrow (or rent) an electric bicycle or scooter in Dublin for the next few months to speed up the commute between shifts? Thank you! (2/2)
— Anna O'Leary (@olearyan) March 24, 2020
Electric bike start-up MobyMove stepped in and have offered free access to their fleet of electric bikes to doctors and nurses in the capital for free. They're looking for the public's support to make this initiative sustainable.
We can provide our bikes, infrastructure and staff and will be covering our fixed and asset costs but as a small local start up in pre-launch phase, we lack the resources to fund the operational overheads of this project & also provide the service free of charge to health care workers. So we need your help, we are asking members of the public to help fund the day to day running costs of this project, so healthcare staff can ride for free.
The cost to provide this service is €150 euro per bike per month or €5 euro per bike per day. Our goal is to get 60 electric bikes to healthcare staff for 1 month which has a total cost of €9000 and if we raise more than this we can extend the free rental period.
Doctors and nurses are doing so much in the battle against the virus. Hopefully these two schemes will make their working day that bit easier.
