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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.