I carpooled to work for several years, being guilted into it by having smart friends.
But it never really worked for me. It cost me money and perhaps a promotion. Being tied to three other people and their schecules and delays and failures to appear was just wrong for me.
But carpooling for taking the kids to school was great and made sense. They all were always on time and went to the exact same place.
Yeah I came in to say this. Real cite andWiki Cite I think it is safe to say that it really deserves more serious study - it is a seemingly chaotic but really market driven solution to policies set by the government to reduce congestion - and seems to produce a win-win solution.
Besides it is a pretty neat cultural phenomenon. and I am surprised it isn’t more than (basically) a DC-NOVA thing - wiki says it is a bit more but I mean National-International.
It wouldn’t work well for me, although I live within five miles of five coworkers, because I like to get to work early and they tend to get in late, and because I often like to do things after work like go out with some other coworkers for dinner, or do the grocery shopping, or run other errands. If I needed to stay late at work, I couldn’t because I’d be stuck going home whenever they did. Car pooling is not worth the hassle it’d create for me. I’d prefer to go to the expense of driving myself so that I don’t live on someone else’s schedule - which is exactly the same reason I dislike public transportation.
I had long rejected the thought of carpooling, since I too wanted my alone time and didn’t want my schedule dictated by others. However, I agreed to carpool with a couple of co-workers back when gas prices were sky-high.
It was great. It was additional motivation to get up and moving and out the door on time. It was the perfect excuse for why I couldn’t stay late for “just a few minutes” (“sorry, carpool’s leaving”). It was nice having someone around to chat with when the day had been one of those days, or to be able to zone out and pay no attention while someone else drove. Plus: much cheaper.
Alas, my carpool buddies no longer work at the company, and there’s no one else who lives conveniently near to me that works my schedule. So I’m back to soloing.
Well that’d be just great if it were guaranteed I’d never lose a project or a promotion because I can’t stay past five, or if the people who live near me had any inclination at all to attempt getting to work with less than three seconds to spare before the first meeting of the day.
I get here a half hour before they do. I like to do things like stay late on Monday to go out for wings, or be available when a choice-but-difficult project requires more than 40 hours of my week.
‘Sorry, car pool is leaving.’ is a good way around here to be thought of as not taking your career seriously.
I work for a company in the petrochemical industry. “Car pool is leaving” usually got the reply “You car pool? Good for you!” The company encourages carpooling as part of its responsible care committment. Never caused me to miss out on any opportunities (although I was occasionally on my cell phone for much of the drive).
And we each regularly had to drive on our own, to accomdate late meetings, needing to stay for extra work, to come in early, etc. But it put the onus on others to plan ahead when they needed one of us for that. It was a very nice way to make people stop presuming that my work time was uncommitted and I was available without notice (which definately isn’t the case). And it made me plan my own day a little better (I can allow more chatting time now that I’m a car loner again).
Of course, the key was that I quite liked my carpool buddies; they’re good guys. When emergencies came up (at work or home), they’d understand.
The DC area has a service called Commuter Connections to encourage people to use transit or carpooling. The understanding is that many people drive just to have a car around for an emergency at home or unscheduled overtime.
If this happens to subscribers of this service, their ride home is paid for. They can do this 4 times per year.
It is a project of the local Council of Governments.
When you are driving solo, you can fart when you want to.
Oddly enough, I saw someone driving behind me last Friday morning with a fully dressed, made up mannequin in the passenger seat. The thing is, there are no beauty schools anywhere nearby, and the mannequin was just barely realistic looking enough to fool me with a first glance. Is it mean of me to assume that they were using it for the advantages of the HOV lane in their morning commute? 
Why don’t they build more roads? I know the U.S. has less fuel duty than we do, but the cars are not limitless.
Over the last fifty years it has been demonstrated, time and again, that more and wider roads will generate more traffic. I’ve heard several reasons for this, but it seems to be true. The only thing I’ve seen to truly cut down on traffic is economics. When the bubble burst, roads in Silicon Valley got a lot nicer to drive on.
Some places encouraging carpooling had a guaranteed ride home - either a company car would be supplied, or the company would pay for a cab when an emergency came up. You can’t plan on a kid getting sick. But I don’t think late meetings qualify.
However, when a VP calls a late meeting because his boss is bugging him, and you truly have to be there, the “you should plan better” argument is not going to fly. I’m not sure anyone wants to demonstrate his or her irrelevance by not being missed at meetings like this, or sense of priorities by being necessary and not being there. My company and my management is quite good about respecting personal time, but the higher you are the less likely it is that you can work truly regular hours.