Ed: Thanks to Eric Steuer at Wired for reminding me of this. I’m going to try this starting tomorrow.
SF Chronicle ; January 31, 2005
This is the one line people actually like to stand in. Or park in, for that matter.
Every weekday morning, mostly in the East Bay, you see them lined up like lemmings — sedans, SUVs, pickup trucks and the odd sports car, creeping along the curb. Coming up the sidewalk toward them, dressed for the day’s battle with the city, are the hardy commuters.
It’s the casual carpool, a free-form, almost completely unorganized amalgam of that rare thing in the social economy — something that actually works, an idea that benefits most of the people involved. Cars heading for San Francisco get filled with people going in the same direction, and the drivers can use carpool lanes to bypass the wait at the Bay Bridge tollbooths and, as lagniappe, save $3 a day.
Now the carpool experiment — though it’s probably unfair to call a 30- year-old activity an experiment — has spread from its birthplaces in Oakland and Berkeley into such far-flung places as Vallejo and Fairfield, growing even as the Bay Area grows.
“It’s better than BART. I can always get a seat, it’s free, it’s faster, and I hate to drive,” said Helen Wolff, a 26-year-old attorney who has been getting rides to the city from a carpool pickup point near the Safeway on Claremont Avenue in Oakland for the past four months. “It’s the closest I’ll come to hitchhiking. It adds a bit of adventure to the morning commute.”
Wolff is one of hundreds or even thousands of people, for all anyone knows — the beauty of this operation is that no government agency monitors it — who are part of a commuting venture that has produced its own culture of behavior, the do’s and don’ts of being a rider and driver.
