Carpooling: An Idea Whose Time Has Come…Again (UPDATE)

UPDATE: After we posted this story, we heard from the folks at Divide The Ride, a service that busy parents can use to form carpools for their kids. Parents enter their kids' activity schedule and invite families they know and trust to join the carpool. A carpool calendar is created and families who join the carpool will be emailed a complete schedule and reminders. Divide the Ride claims it's the only service designed exclusively for parents...and what parent couldn't use an extra set of wheels, for free?

My mother likes to tell a story about my father going to get gas for the car one winter’s night, long ago. Our regular gas station was about a half-mile away; under normal circumstances, a less-than-15-minute errand.

But there was nothing normal about the energy crisis of 1973.

Later – after two hours and one frantic call from my mother to a neighbor to go out and track him down – my father returned with a tale of going to our gas station, only to wait on line and watch the gas run out before he got any. He went from empty station to empty station, and was able to find some gas somewhere, eventually. Soon after that he joined a four-man carpool of co-workers for his daily 30-mile trip (one way) from our home in suburban Long Island to his job at John F. Kennedy Airport in Queens.

And here we sit, 35 years later, alone again in our cars, again running out of gas…

As we enter the era of post-peak oil production, carpooling is reappearing as a strategy to cope with dwindling supplies and sky-high prices. But instead of asking around at work to find potential co-riders (still a great option), you can use one of a handful of Internet-based companies to find or offer your ride. NuRide, Essex, Connecticut, matches potential carpoolers using profiles and criteria that users choose, and provides an email system so they can contact each other. Users can earn rewards such as gift cards to major retailers when they earn a certain number of points based on rides completed. According to NuRide, in 2007 its members arranged 400,000 carpools, traveled about 12.5 million miles less, and saved half a million gallons of gas. NuRide requires users to be affiliated with an organization such as a university or a business, so there is some level of security for users.

So pair up and start your Prius…