If you only do one thing this week … car shareSharing a lift on the way to work not only spreads the cost of petrol, it will give you and your company a green glow, says Adharanand Finn

Car sharing: It doesn't have to be quite this extreme. Photograph: Ferran Paredes/Reuters-Corbis

In these days of mobile phones and iPods, we're uncomfortable letting strangers into our personal space. Only small children and old ladies would risk smiling at someone on a city bus. So why would you want to let someone into the cosy confines of your car, particularly in the fragile early morning hours before the start of the working day?

Advocates of lift sharing have a host of sound reasons. The most compelling are that it saves you money and reduces car emissions – this is simple maths: two people driving together in one car produce roughly half the emissions of two people travelling in two cars. They can also split the cost of petrol.

More questionable is the assertion, on the leading lift sharing website, liftshare.com, that it is more fun. You can make new friends, it cheerfully suggests. A nice idea, but in practice – at least when I tried it years ago – just as you come to arrange a lift you begin worrying about the possibility that your potential sharer will be a mass murderer or something.

At best your lift sharer will be a terrible bore or have poor personal hygiene (or both), and you'll be stuck together, for hours, just the two of you, side by side, staring at the road ahead. For the sake of a few pounds and some petrol emissions wouldn't it be easier to not bother?

This uneasiness we feel about sharing a car with a stranger has not only contributed to the slow death of hitchhiking in recent years (in the UK at least), but is prohibiting the uptake of lift sharing.

Liftshare.com is now more than 10 years old, and although it has more than 300,000 registered users, many, I suspect, are like me – people who signed up a long time ago but have never actually arranged a lift, while others may not be able to match their requirements with a person who can help out. Artist Melissa Beagley recently tried to arrange a lift from London to Devon on a Friday night, but couldn't find a single person going her way.

But with the recession in full swing and the planet getting ever hotter, this is a good moment to reassert your faith in your fellow humans and do something to help this noble lift sharing idea on its way. With tomorrow designated National liftshare day there is no better time to start.

The uncertainty of potential sharers can be reduced to some extent by setting up a lift sharing group within your workplace. You can do this with a basic noticeboard in the office on which people can list their journeys, or on the office intranet or online – liftshare.com will organise a page for your company on its website.

An office-based scheme will also give you a chance to get to know your colleagues better, and it should be easier to arrange a lift as you're all heading the same way – to work.

The only downside, according to Amy Bunting, who lift shared when she worked for Barclaycard in Northampton, is people being late for the pickup.

"One man I shared with was absolutely terrible at getting up and he ended up getting dressed in my car on the way to work most mornings," she says. "That looked great when we arrived at work and he was doing up his belt and tucking his shirt in as we got out of the car."

If you ask nicely, your company may stump up some incentives to get the scheme started – and encourage people to be on time, such as vouchers for the canteen. In return it gets a positive boost to its eco-status and, if the scheme takes off, the need for fewer parking spaces.

For maximum green bonus points it could even turn a few of the redundant spaces into an office allotment – or is that going a bit too far?