What was your favorite cartoon duo as a child? Batman & Robin, Tom & Jerry, Calvin & Hobbs, Archie & Jughead, Fred & Barney or the Flintstones?
What about famous TV or movie duos you liked? Thelma & Louise, C3PO & R2D2, Bill & Friday (Dragnet), Abbot & Costello, Vincent & Jules (Pulp Fiction), Wayne & Garth, Bonnie & Clyde, Smokey and the Bandit, Chris Tucker & Jackie Chan?
All of these famous duos made superhero travel choices. They all carpool. In fact, more than 10% of Americans carpool to and from work every day. Although some dispute exists (http://www.planetizen.com/node/51565), and surveys show carpooling has dropped in recent years, when it comes to alternative modes of transportation, there is no denying that more people use carpools to get to work than any other alternate.
Drive Alone 76%
Carpool 10%
Public Transit 5%
Telecommute 5%
Walk 3%
Motorcycle 0.2%
Taxi 0.1%
All Others 0.7%
*Source: US Census
American policy http://paulasteinberg.com/ridesharing-enigma/ toward the automobile has always been supportive, including the Commuter Tax Benefit http://www.irs.gov/publications/p15b/ar02.html provided by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). We have also seen regional examples of policy changes that have significantly impacted motivations to carpool, including the introduction of a toll on the San Francisco Bay Bridge detrimentally impacted the use of casual carpooling. http://managedlanes.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/2_Impact-of-Carpool-Tolls-on-Bay-Bridge-Casual-Carpooling-A-Case-Study.pdf
The Annual Urban Mobility Report from the Texas A&M Transportation Institute http://mobility.tamu.edu/ums/shows our daily commute times continue to increase with greater than 30% of commuters spending more than 30 minutes getting to and from work every day. For the majority of Americans who drive alone that’s one hour everyday, stressed out in traffic. This choice not only reduces American productivity and fuels our dependency on foreign oil, but it takes away more than 250 hours (> 10 days) of your your life, each and every year.
So, what is the psychology behind https://medium.com/rideshares-carpools/the-year-of-the-riderless-car-88391fd9eabc this voluntary choice to put ourselves through such misery? It’s completely contrary to our genetic makeup, or our upbringing. Humans by nature are social animals and we start carpooling the day we leave the hospital. In fact, every child carpools every single day until at least 15 years old. Even when we first get to drive an automobile, the first years are filled with carpools with friends and family.
Something happens between the ages of 20 and 30 whereby we start choosing to drive alone instead of by the same carpool method we had been using for two decades. Maybe we should enlist Kid President http://kidpresident.com/ to get the word out to parents that if it’s good enough for kids, then why isn’t carpooling good enough for working parents?
Maybe our tendency towards driving alone comes from the lack of a commute hero when we grow up. As a child we had lots of examples of duos that made a good choice on how they commute to work. But Hollywood doesn’t expose us to carpooling in the movies or television, and organic models like casual carpooling https://medium.com/keepin-it-casual-sf/keepin-it-casual-in-sf-4dfe2c667068 are perceived as too weird for mainstream adoption.
The most famous example of a theatrical success would be the UK comedy Carpool http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpool_(TV_series) hosted by Robert Llewellyn who picks up celebrity guests and “chews the fat” with them while he drives them to their destination. Jerry Seinfeld produced a series called “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” http://comediansincarsgettingcoffee.com/ that many claim was loosely based upon the same theme. These are the few examples lost among other productions that never achieved box office appeal:
- Carpoolers 2007 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0928410/
- Carpool Showdown was like “Cash Cab” http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/cash-cab for casual carpooling http://www.sideshowentertainment.tv/#!carpool-showdown/c42w
- Carpool 1983 with Harvey Korman http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085302/
- Carpool 1996 with Tom Arnold http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115836/
Our American car culture is filled with examples of how we love sharing our cars: family vacations, tailgate parties at sporting events, dinner and a movie with your partner, and visiting family during the summer holidays from Memorial Day to Labor Day weekend. The paradox is that we love to socialize with family and friends in our cars on special occasions, yet continue to drive alone during our daily commute.
Hollywood has a long tradition of shaping American culture, and now we need them to set a good example for our commute habits. My company Carma recently announced a $1,000,000 prize https://carmacarpool.com/prize/ for a developer to help solve the daily commute problem. Maybe we need an Academy Award at The Oscars for the best carpoolers in America. I know a lot of soccer moms that would get nominated for that trophy, and I bet you know a few commute champs yourself. Who would you nominate?
Carpooling; if it’s good enough for our children… shouldn’t it be good enough for you?
