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AUTOMOBILES AND STANFORD


Hitchhiking Si! Car pooling No! 

	Everyone who  thinks about people  commuting to  work wonders
why there  isn't more car pooling.  The  advantages are the saving in
gas expenses and sharing the work of driving.  The advantages  can be
made somewhat larger by favoring car pooling in allocation of parking
spaces and in bridge lanes and bridge tolls. 

	However,  the amount  of car  pooling has reduced  with time.
The car pools formed when  gas was rationed in World War II  broke up
quickly  as soon as  rationing ended.   There  is a  certain residual
level of car pooling, but it has probably been decreasing.  Advocates
of car  pooling often propose  various measures  that they hope  will
increase its  use.  Positive measures  proposed include computer aids
for finding car pooling partners and various kinds of  favoritism for
car  pools, and  negative  measures include  restricting the  parking
privileges of those who don't conform. 

	The  motives of those  who want to encourage  car pooling are
social.  They want to reduce traffic, to  reduce the requirements for
parking, and to reduce the  use of energy either because they believe
there is  a  short  or  long  term crisis  or  because  the  see  the
individual automobile as unesthetically inefficient. 

	Well, if so  many people have  ignored the advantages  of car
pooling for  such a long time, perhaps  there are some disadvantages.
Here are some that I can think of:

	1. The major disadvantage is  that a car pool commits one  to
fixed hours of going to work and  returning home.  Committed to a car
pool,  you cannot run  errands on the  way home or  go somewhere else
entirely  from  work  or come  to  work  early  or  late.    This  is
particularly acute when one is committed to drive.  I suspect this is
the main reason. 

	2. The disadvantage that the commuting journey is  lengthened
by the  need to pick  up others  is probably lesser.   It depends  on
ratio  of   the  local  distances  to   the  long  distance  commute.
Associated with  it is  the  fact that  meeting a  schedule  requires
allowing extra time for contingencies. 

	The most successful car pools today are those associated with
chauffering children to private schools or other events.  These work,
because they  genuinely  save labor  and  increasee the  participants
flexibility.  

	In general, it seems that  people will pay a very large price
for the ability to schedule their  activities flexibly.  In fact,  it
can  be argued  that  a  large  fraction of  the  American  increased
productivity  since 1900 has  been expended  on getting out  of fixed
living and commuting arrangements, and a large part of the demand for
further improvements in living and  working conditions is precisely a
demand  for even greater flexibility.  If  this is true than the idea
of encouraging car pooling is simply tilting at windmills.