The undercover carpooler
The first morning was a mess. More to the point, I was a mess. I’m usually hyper-organized, but today I’m running late, no time for breakfast… where are my keys? Wait, don’t I need a dollar to pay for my ride? After stealing $5 from my boyfriend’s wallet (sorry Gavin!) I’m finally on my way. This is my first morning as a Casual Carpooler and clearly I’m in an excellent mood.
At 8:08 am I arrive at the North Berkeley Casual Carpool spot and it’s frantic; at least it appears frantic to me. The line of riders is long, and the steady stream of cars can’t seem to pull up fast enough. As the full carpools pull away from the sidewalk, traffic flowing past seems unaffected. This is, after all, an every day occurrence for these commuters and they maneuver around this constant onslaught of casual carpool drivers with ease.
As the line of riders shortens in front of me and grows behind me I can see how systematic this whole activity is: a car pulls up, the two riders at the front of the line step forward, the first rider gets in the back of the car and the second in the front, the car pulls off. It’s a simple process repeated thousands of times daily. I saw very little deviation aside from cars occasionally offering to take three riders, or the rare group of riders letting their turn go so they can ride together in the next car. There is no hesitation about joining a car, no question, no taking pictures of license plates — nothing. It’s simple and it works.
As I near the front of the line, the feeling of trepidation rises. What if I do it wrong? When do I offer the dollar? Do I get in the front or the back? Will they know it’s my first time? Suddenly, I’m at the front of the line. This is it. This is the moment. A car pulls up and as I casually walk towards the back door of the car, my confidence grows. A girl in her mid-thirties gets in the front and the fact that there are two ladies and only one male (the driver) somehow puts me at ease.
I follow the lead of my clearly more experienced counterpart — she doesn’t offer a dollar towards the toll, so I remain silent. As I take in the fact that I’m sharing the back seat with a carefully hung suit jacket, the driver does something completely shocking to me — he speaks. He actually begins striking up a conversation. He starts small: “long lines this morning, huh?”, but by the time we hit the highway the conversation is in full swing. My carpool partners are busy sharing stories of Casual Carpools gone awry. I nod and smile fervently in the back seat (I am undercover after all!). We begin with cars that smelled of smoke, move on to the time our driver saw a (very lost) three-wheeler GoCar on the Bay Bridge, and then the story of the driver who missed the carpool lane and ended up on an access road underneath the bridge. All these tales are told with a grin and a wink, there is not an iota of fear or frustration evident in their voices. Ultimately, our driver concludes “there are just some strange people in the world, you know”.
As we cruise at about 40 mph, passing the standstill traffic at the toll plaza, I sit back and take in the nice clean car, the great people I’m traveling with, the pleasant conversation, and I wonder why people are so scared of this mode of transport. I wonder how we get so stuck in our ways that we accept driving on our own — the clearly sub-par method of commuting. We even delude ourselves into thinking that being an SOV driving into San Francisco is better than Casual Carpooling, in spite of all the clear advantages we are presented with.
As we near the city and I take in the skyline from the bridge, I am reminded of an old colleague of mine who used to say ‘Commuters are just like frogs’ (usually to a very confused audience). ‘Start them off in cold water and they don’t realize they are being boiled, even as the temperature rises’. And years after I first heard this it still rings true. We, the SOV commuters, are the frog. We accept a 30 min commute and as traffic increases slowly over time we continue to accept it. Within a few years, we are wasting an hour a day — over 200 hours a year — sitting in traffic and we don’t even notice. The human brain is a mysterious thing, capable of so much, capable even of fooling itself.
Jumping out of my ride at 08:36 am, less than 30mins after joining the line in North Berkeley, I can’t help but wonder how these Casual Carpoolers broke that mold, and why more people haven’t yet joined them.
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This blog was written in conjunction with www.carmacarpool.com
