Team Carma has been interested in the casual carpooling idea for a while now. Casual carpooling is the white-collar worker’s version of hitchhiking. Commuters access cars like buses, reduce commute costs and speed past traffic in carpool lanes.
While promoting carpooling throughout the US, we have seen for ourselves how convenient and efficient this transit mode is. In fact, during the summer of 2013, Team Carma members (developers, designers, marketers and even our COO) all went to the Bay Area and used casual carpools to get in and out of the city.
This inspired us to carry out some research into the casual carpooling phenomenon, because we wanted to figure out how it works and why people use it. The results of this research have given us some really surprising insights, and we want to share these with you through this series of articles.
Casual carpooling brings at least 11,500 people from the East Bay into the city every day. There are 28 separate pickup locations for morning commutes, all servicing a single drop-off location in San Francisco. We used a number of different survey methods – for example, as well as interviewing commuters, we physically counted cars and riders as they arrived at and left various locations.
The first thing we learned is that you don’t get a lot of time to interview people. They get a lift so fast (usually within a few minutes) that our survey had to be quick and to the point!
We asked 284 people a range of questions about their casual carpooling experiences. We were eager to find out about the distances that people travel to get to their pickup point, as well as the distance they travel from the drop-off point to their final destination.
The answers were incredible. 66% (149/226) of respondents had less than 1 mile to travel to their pickup location. Of those 149 people, 130 had less than 1 mile to travel from the drop-off location to their final destination.
80% (172/216) of respondents said that they walked from the drop-off point to their final destination. Of those 172 people, 161 had less than 1 mile to walk. Of the 20% who did not walk, the majority (17%) took public transit to get to their final destination. To summarize, casual carpooling is very much a local service for users whose commutes are centred around the pickup and drop- off locations.
Almost half the people surveyed (130/284) live and work within a 1 mile radius of the pickup and drop-off locations. People who are using casual carpooling are essentially neighbors who live and work within a mile of each other. It is impossible to underestimate the convenience of a simple walk from home to a pickup point, and then from the drop-off point to the commuter’s final destination.
So, according to the folks on the East Bay, it is convenience that drives the casual carpool experience. For these 11,500 people, casual carpooling is more convenient than the BART, the bus or driving alone. Also, they live and work close to each other. They are neighbors without even realizing it. If you’re looking to encourage carpooling in your area or your organization then the first step is to ensure that it is convenient.
In Part 2 of this series I’ll be sharing exciting results that show how, once people start casual carpooling, it becomes their number one method of getting to work.
If you have any stories or experiences to share about running carpool initiatives, why not comment below or get in touch!