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Carpooling: A way to meet friends, influence people

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It was the first night of a conference in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in October, and I needed a ride to my motel, 10 miles from the conference site. As part of my ongoing experiment in traveling without my own car, I approached a stranger, wondering how he would react to a request that he let me into his car. It turns out he was a transportation planner, and he was delighted when I asked him for a ride.

I was without a car because I'd arrived at the conference by driving to Albany, N.Y., and then traveling by train, bus and by hitchhiking the last eight miles. The conference organizers had tried to make it easy for people to find rides with others. They had considerately set up a ride board where people could post message requests, and the evening's master of ceremonies asked participants after the last talk to check the ride board and offer a ride with someone who needed it.

I thought I could just stand around and wait for my carpool to find me. The conference was on "Peak Oil and Community Solutions," so the hundreds of people attending were interested in helping each other, I thought. My name, destination and cell phone number were on the ride board, which was on an easel just outside the auditorium where the evening's talks were held.

Before long, I could see the plan wasn't working. The people streaming out of the auditorium didn't glance at the ride board; they simply continued out the building's front doors. I started to picture myself in an empty building, at night, 10 miles from my motel with luggage and no car or bicycle to make the trip manageable.

Changing tactics, I started asking people at random if they could give me a ride to my motel. Everyone was friendly. Many people were going in a different direction, or their car was already full. I eventually found a ride with two people staying at the motel, but not before I had asked Miami Valley Regional Planning Commission staffer Bob Steinbach, who was heading in a different direction. The next morning, I was surprised to hear Steinbach tell the whole conference about our brief encounter.

Steinbach held a talk the following day on the importance of ride sharing as future gas supplies become pinched. He described many detailed plans for hooking riders up with drivers, some similar to VTrans' Vermont RideShare. At the end, though, Steinbach highlighted a simple but very important shift that every individual can make: "Start to offer rides or ask for rides from people. That's an unused skill."

Nodding at me, Steinbach continued, "I had somebody ask me for a ride last evening here. It's the first time in a long time that I had a stranger ask me for a ride. We've got to get back to thinking, 'Can we ask each other for a ride?'"

Sure, I'm doing this transportation experiment, but mostly I thought I was just trying to bum a ride from the guy. It seemed that he saw me as some kind of pioneer in a necessary, new movement.

Bob Steinbach's comments helped me see a lot of lessons for the much larger puzzle of how to motivate people to prepare for the declining availability of energy after peak oil. Asking strangers for a 10-mile ride to my motel was a small, easy step toward being able to travel when fuel is less available. The situation was more forgiving than it will be later; the gas stations of central Ohio had plenty of gas to sell. Even had I found no one driving to the motel who had room for me and my luggage, I'm confident I could have located a taxi.

Some lessons I drew from the experiment were: