Driving alone still rules in car-happy Vermont as carpooling awaits a new surge
Vermonters are represented by a socialist. They're the most leftwing state in the country and even they won't carpool.
BTW my wife has carpooled for years. I challenge any greens reading this to post if they or a family member carpool.
Ian Thomas Jansen-Lonnquist, for the Free Press
Sharron Biglow of Bristol, left, and Angela Gatesy of Huntington carpool three days a week to the University of Vermont where they both work from the Hinesburg Park and Ride behind the Hinesburg Town Hall.
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BY TIM JOHNSON, FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER • SUNDAY, JUNE 20, 2010
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Here’s the peculiar thing about carpooling: It’s been around forever. It’s easier to arrange than ever, thanks to digital matching of drivers and riders. People have more good reasons to do it than ever, as public efforts to raise energy efficiencies and reduce carbon footprints assume a new urgency.
And yet carpooling still enlists a small minority of the car-dependent population, both nationally and in Vermont. In fact, carpooling is less popular today — by a long shot — than it was three decades ago, back before anyone had heard of climate change, much less begun to worry about it.
Not that carpooling makes any less sense now than it used to. It makes even more, as Vermont struggles to rein in emissions from its biggest global-warming sector, transportation — in which one of the biggest culprits is the single-occupant vehicle. Three-quarters of Vermont’s commuters drive to work alone.
Nor does carpooling lack advocates. They’re armed with new software, new incentives and new media campaigns. The state is pushing carpooling in a big way by funding Park & Ride lots and the Go Vermont program, which boasts a redesigned, website that offers a free, user-friendly matching service and tips on how to “make your carpool experience a positive one.” And local alternative-transportation activists, notably in Hinesburg, have started up their own community-based ride-sharing initiatives.
With boosts from new enthusiasm, new environmental awareness and new resources (the annual budget for Go Vermont next year is expected to be about $350,000, much of which goes for marketing), maybe carpooling will take off in Vermont as a preferred mode of transportation.
Or maybe not. The advocates are pushing against some powerful currents, pinpointed in preliminary research by the Transportation Research Center at the University of Vermont.
Since 1980, when the commuter carpooling rate in Vermont peaked at 25 percent, car ownership rates have risen, households have diminished in size, vehicle efficiency has improved and settlement patterns have remained diffuse — all of which mitigate against ride-sharing and explain, in part, why the current rate is around 11 percent. A larger share of commuters drives alone today than 30 years ago, after the ¤’70s energy crisis with its famous gas shortages.
National carpooling rates have been even lower than Vermont’s over the last 40 years. In 1970, the national rate was 11.7 percent (Vermont’s was 15.2 percent), and in 2006-08, 10.6 percent.
Interest in carpooling seems to rise with gas prices.
“Most definitely,” said Karla Munson, an organizer of Hinesburg Rides, a volunteer nonprofit group that offers a ride-share matching program. “ When gas prices rose to almost $4 a gallon a few years ago, we had more calls and more people signed up in our manual database.”
Ross MacDonald, program manager of Go Vermont, agrees. “There is a direct correlation between gas prices and website hits,” he said. “ Go Maine ran a regression analysis and found this strong correlation, and anecdotally, we receive more calls when gas prices spike.”
Empty spaces
Just inside the entrance of the municipal ramp west of Macy’s, off Cherry Street, Burlington has designated four parking spaces. Each has a posted sign that reads “Van Pool Parking Only.” A registered van with three or more people can park all day for free — an $8 saving.
At 11:30 Wednesday morning, each of the four spaces was empty, while all of the 36 unrestricted spaces in the same section of the parking garage were filled.
Two spot checks during regular workdays in the week before revealed the same result: empty van-pool spaces.
Pat Buteau, who manages the city’s parking garages, said the free spaces have been available for three or four years, but only one or two drivers have registered.
Hinesburg’s Park & Ride lot behind the town hall was empty Wednesday morning until Sharron Bigelow of Bristol arrived about 7:30. She sat in her Corolla for about five minutes until Angela Gatesy of Huntington drove up in her Honda CRV.
Today it was Gatesy’s turn to drive, which meant they’d probably be listening to NPR en route to UVM, where they both work.
“My car’s the music car,” Bigelow said. She usually goes for an oldies station.
Bigelow, a veteran carpooler (“all my adult life”) said they’d been sharing rides for about year. They found each other through Hinesburg Rides.
“The nice thing about carpooling is the friends you meet,” she said. “I’ve made a good friend.”
Gatesy agreed. She also was motivated, she said, by “the situation as it is, with the oil.”
“This was the little bit I could do,” she said.
They drove off, and the lot was empty except for Bigelow’s car. Between 7 and 8 a.m., prime time for many ride-sharers, no other carpoolers showed up.
Incentives
One of the longest-running carpool programs in Vermont is managed by the Campus Area Transportation Management Association (CATMA), a collaborative of institutions on Burlington’s Hill. What makes this program effective, said Bob Penniman, CATMA’s executive director, is that it’s employer-based, with “hands-on matching” of drivers and riders via an in-house database, maintaining participants’ confidentiality.
He said the carpooling rate is typically 14 to 16 percent of employees, and it varies somewhat with gas-price swings, but not dramatically. UVM carpoolers can receive a free parking space, saving several hundred dollars a year.
“It’s all about the incentives,” Penniman said. A big one for carpoolers — CATMA also promotes public transit and other modes — is the guaranteed ride home. If your ride falls through, CATMA has a contract with a cab company to drive you home.
At National Life Group in Montpelier, about 140 employees carpool, thanks in part to incentives that include gas cards, said Tim Shea, vice president of facilities, purchasing and contracting. The company has been promoting a variety of alternative transit modes since 2007.
M&S Enterprises Inc., a painting firm in Burlington, has been promoting carpooling for years, said Mike Talbot, president. The company foots the gas bill for its employees who carpool to out-of-town jobs, he said.
Two of those employees were waiting for a third in the Richmond Park & Ride one morning last week. Dave Chilcote of Colchester was driving his ¤’04 Town and Country van. Next to him sat Sean Ryan, also of Cochester; they were headed for a job in Stowe.
Chilcote said his van gets better mileage than the company truck, so the gas reimbursement makes sense all around.
Financial incentives — or disincentives; when employers charge for parking, for example — can nudge the ride-sharing rate up, given that “saving money” is the No. 1 reason to carpool, according to a survey of Go Vermont participants. (“Saves wear on the vehicle” and “good for the environment” tied for second place.)
The Go Vermont website makes the savings easy to figure. A commuter with a round trip of 40 miles, free parking and a car that gets 20 miles per gallon receives this message. “Your annual commute costs: $1,648.08. By ridesharing with just 1 other person, you could lower your cost of commuting to: $824.04.”
Go Vermont’s guaranteed-ride-home commitment, MacDonald said, is “the perfect benefit, one that assuages the major concern, but one that is used very little . We processed under 10 GRH reimbursements last fiscal year.”
What would it take?
Vermont has more cars per capita than the national average, a function of the state’s dispersed rural population. A study by the Transportation Research Center found just 15 geographic sites across the state with a residential density high enough (five to seven houses or more per acre) to support public transportation. A spread-out population with a high car-ownership rate is not especially conducive to carpooling.
What’s more, work trips, the staple of carpooling-promotion campaigns, are declining as a share of total personal trips. According to the 2001 National Household Travel Survey, less than 18 percent of daily trips were for work, on average. Most of the others were for family or personal business, or for recreation — trips that seldom are planned far enough in advance to accommodate ride-sharing.
“Historical socioeconomic trends and the massive investment in an auto-dependent system have conspired to place driving alone at the top of the travel hierarchy,” said Richard Watts, a researcher at the center who is studying carpooling. “An astonishing 87 percent of our trips in Vermont — anytime we go somewhere for a purpose — are in a private automobile.”
Given all those trends, he said, “the remarkable thing is that so many people still carpool. They do it because it saves money and because the social aspects are of much greater value than driving alone.”
Of the 3,000 people registered with Go Vermont, MacDonald said, about 20 percent are sharing rides. Hits to the website have quadrupled since it was redesigned to become more user-friendly, he said. Go Vermont is mounting a major outreach campaign, and there are plans to offer prizes during the next year to draw more interest.
“The great thing about carpooling,” Watts said, “is that it uses the same highway system and roads we’ve already built and bought, without adding more costs. Every added passenger reduces energy use and the environmental impacts of driving.”
Nevertheless, carpooling remains a minor player in the transportation drama, mired in the 10-11 percent range for commuters. What would it take to push that up to 30 or 40 percent?
“High energy costs, I’m afraid,” MacDonald said. “No one wants to tell folks how to travel, and when gas prices reach a certain point where all of us will have to consider high prices, Go Vermont will be here with the framework and capacity to be an important tool for those looking to reduce their energy use.
“We can’t drive the demand much,” he continued, “but we can be ready for it when the disparate and direct conditions create the demand.”
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