Story #15: Casual Carpool

I live in Oakland and work in San Francisco. I have a car, but it is against my religion to drive it to the city, both because that is not good for the Earth and also because that is not good for my blood pressure. I am already an excitable person. I do not need to add navigating the Bay Bridge to the mix.

Subaru aside, there are a number of options for getting to work:

•take the AC transit (East Bay bus system) #12 to 19th Street BART

•walk for twenty minutes to 19th Street BART, carrying all my school stuff

•ride the TransBay bus

•...or, drum roll please, Casual Carpool

Casual Carpool is a system that sounds incredibly unreliable and actually potentially dangerous in theory, but one that in practice runs like a well-oiled and completely unattended machine. When I first heard of it I was sure it was an urban legend, but it is completely true and without it I would not get to school in the morning. If Casual Carpool is not something with which you are familiar, I will now offer you an explanation.

The Bay Bridge connects Oakland to San Francisco. There is a toll to cross it headed westbound and there are also very long lines at certain times of the day. Morning commute traffic is known to be especially heavy and slow. If you have three or more people in your vehicle, however, you get two special privileges to reward you for not being one of those people in their car all by themselves: you are exempt from the bridge toll, and you fly past the maze that leads up to the toll plaza because you are in the carpool lane.

Throughout the East Bay (Berkeley, Oakland, Alameda, El Cerrito, Emeryville, Richmond, Fairfield, and the like) there are locations where people rendez-vous to get their Casual Carpool on every morning. Drivers pull up and wait in line, while riders queue on the sidewalk. When there's a driver, and two riders, the car leaves. The driver saves the price of a bridge toll, the riders save the price of a BART ticket to the city. Simple as that.

I get into Casual Carpool at Grand and Perkins, half a block from my house. I have never had to wait more than two, count them, minutes to get in a car and go. Rides have ranged from a scary Scooby Doo-style conversion van in which I was sure I was being kidnapped, to this morning's sage-green Prius. There are rules for Casual Carpool: no talking unless initiated by the driver, no cell phone conversations, no eating or drinking, and no radio unless it is NPR and even then the driver gets to pick whether you listen or not. Everyone drops off at the TransBay Terminal in the city, just at the bottom of the Fremont Street off-ramp, unless you are at the two Casual Carpool locations that also have a Civic Center option for the destination (um, I wish that was the case for my CC spot because that would shave about 20 minutes and one MUNI Metro ride per day off my commute).

I will now begin posting updates each day about which scary kidnapper van, or supah-fly sports car ride, I end up with for my Casual Carpool each day. Because, you might not care but the way my day begins is directly influenced by this luck of the draw. Think of me each morning at 7 a.m. PST, and keep your fingers crossed for no dog-hair-laden backseats. Ewww.