Town considers mass carpooling
Sandra McCulloch, Canwest News Service
Sometimes the best ideas are easy and obvious - and have been tried before.
A pilot project that matches people needing a lift with drivers going in the same direction is getting rolling in Qualicum Beach.
Its proponent, Coun. Mike Wansink, based the Good Samaritan Ride Program on a successful scheme that’s been operating since 1971 in Washington D.C., where he attended university in the mid-1990s.
He commuted into Washington from Virginia and the high-occupancy lanes cut travel time by an hour, but motorists had to have at least two other passengers in the car to use them.
As others have remarked, the real problem of congestion is the predominance of single occupant vehicles. In fact in this region average car occupancy is quite a bit higher than other US metropolitan regions - they think 1.3 per car looks good! But even so, the people carrying capacity of a lane of freeway is still pretty low compared to any transit option - but increased car pooling does not seem to happen. Instead to fight the “empty lane syndrome” the occupancy has been reduced - in some places to 2+. As someone else remarked ” 2+ is not a carpool - it’s a date!”
Qualicum Beach could not make a go of transit. We could but in many suburban areas we are not even trying very hard. Of course, when the province prefers to build freeways and tube trains, there really is not much choice. Few municipal governments think spending property taxes on buses is a vote winner in communities that are car oriented.
So for low density suburbs with little or no transit, car pooling should be more attractive. And of course you have to satisfy people that it is safe to do and legal. Picking up hitchhikers is not either (is there another word with a double ‘h’ in it?) though I used to do it quite happily once upon a time. And if money changes hands the taxi operators get all huffy and complain to the powers that be. But in a world that’s heating up and running out of cheap oil, operating most of our multiple seat vehicles nearly empty does not make much sense, does it?
At least one on line car sharing site was shut down by the protective instincts of the long distance bus industry. And formal car pooling/sharing seems to be stuck at where it was years ago. So I do think that we need to start getting a bit more adventurous and push the current restrictions back a bit. Today Qualicum Beach, tomorrow a low density suburb near you!
I would be quite happy if every car had just two people in it instead of one. If every car traveling HWY 1 at rush hour had two people in it, that would halve the number of cars on the road. I consider that a substantial improvement.
It seems to me that it’s not exactly easy to find multiple people who live in the same neighbourhood, work in the same neighbourhood, and also start/end work at the same time, for the purposes of carpooling. Perhaps I’m wrong, I don’t know first hand because I don’t drive.
If you’re a car driver, and you manage to find one other person to ride with you, yet the carpool lane requires that you have 3 or 6 people in your car to use it, what’s the motivation to carpool at all?
Maybe we need to try boiling the frog on this one, slowly. First we make the carpool lane require two people in a car. When everyone has two people in their car, then you switch the carpool lane to require three people and so on. At each point the required change is marginal but the motivation is good, to get in the faster lane. For this to work you’d have to determine the point at which there are so many cars with two people in them that it is no longer faster to travel in the carpool lane. It’s probably at that point that you need to up the requirements of the carpool lane, or maybe switch one of the non-carpool lanes to a carpool lane. All the while NOT expanding the freeway. But maybe this is silly and wouldn’t work. After all, we’ve been trying to get two people into a car for years and it hasn’t worked.