Casual Carpooling: Hitch-hiking to Work
Weeks earlier we were sitting house down at Oyster Cove, a half hours drive south of town. There too, I caught the bus just once in over two weeks of house sitting, and got to know a few of the folk from the Channel country. Friendly folk south of Hobart.
It reminded me of the Oakland Bay Bridge in San Francisco somehow, where for years, because of HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) lanes on the bridge people have been thumbing in to work with real success. Drivers find it in their interest to pick someone up, fill the car and take the fast lane. The American's with their cultural aversion to any of the traditional words call it "Casual Carpooling". It's one way to win respect from the community at large for doing essentially the same thing.
They, from memory, only hitch in to town in the mornings and tend to use public transport heading home again. I faced the same dilemma. It's easy of course to hitch in to town of a morning, half the city is migrating in precisely that direction on the pilgrimage to work-place. In short, everyone's going in one direction, my way - into town! On the way home though, people are spreading out in all directions and the flagging scenario gets a little complicated.
The University of British Columbia has instituted a laudable program, UBC Trek, aimed at reducing the number of single occupancy vehicle trips and from the university. In 2001 they published the following strong recommendation:
- CASUAL CARPOOLING
Casual carpooling, or instant ridesharing, is a type of ridesharing arrangement whereby drivers wishing to form carpools pick up passengers waiting by the roadside.
Casual carpooling has proven successful on the Oakland Bay Bridge in the San Francisco Area, the Shirley Highway corridor in the Virginia / Washington, D.C. area, and to a lesser extent in Houston, Texas (Casey et al., FTA). In each of these areas, individuals form instant carpools on a daily basis to take advantage of the travel time savings afforded by HOV lanes, which require vehicle occupancy of three or more. Individuals wanting rides gather at park-and-ride lots and other locations and are picked up by drivers going to the same destination. In all of these examples, casual carpooling was initiated by commuters and continues to operate without any formal planning or sanction by agencies or organizations. One likely reason for the success of casual carpooling has
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