Denver Post on "Fueling Change"
posted by Ben Engebreth on 03.21.2005
So clever those newspaper folks are with their titles.
Fueling Change reports on an interesting survey done by AAA Colorado which claims that 42 percent of Colorado drivers have made changes to their driving habits as a result of the recent price increases. It goes on to say that an additional 42 percent won't make changes until or unless gas prices hit $2.50 a gallon.
The most mentioned changes in driving habits were using mass transit, reducing discretionary driving, and the consideration of new fuel efficient vehicles such as the Hybrid Civic or Prius.
Carpooling was not on the list.
It's hard to deny that carpooling is a good way to reduce fuel consumption. Carpooling is, on the other hand, hard to arrange. That is, it's hard to find someone to carpool with -- especially acting on your own. This has got to be the reason more people don't consider it. If you aren't lucky enough to know someone at work who happens to live down the street from you, well, you're out of luck with regard to carpooling. Of course if we imagine all the people that work with or close by us along with all the people that live near us, it seems that there's likely to be somebody in those two groups who would be a good candidate for us to carpool with.
I wonder what what AAA would find if they asked drivers if they would carpool if they could. If we got all the people together who wanted to carpool -- the if they could-ers -- certainly we could sit down and find people in this group for whom it would be beneficial to carpool with eachother based on where they lived and worked. We'd probably find a bunch of options for any one person if we had the patience to do it. Maybe it turns out some of these people already knew one another. Or maybe they kindof know of eachother through a common friend. Those lucky folks would obviously have that if they could barrier removed pretty quickly. For those that didn't know one another but were geographically speaking good potential carpool buddies, maybe they could get together for coffee or something and see if their personalities were compatible enough to endure on the daily commute. Maybe they'd be more than compatible. Maybe some of these people would become friends in addition to carpooling with one another. We'd probably get a lot of people carpooling if we could do all that. Man that'd be cool.
Now we just need to get a website to approximate all this. :)