The author (far right) and her BART strike team
A recent New York Times article posed the question of whether we have reached “the end of car culture.”
For now, I would say that the absolute normalcy of driving still seems pretty persistent. But how many of us have noticed a shift just in our own habits over the last five years? Do you drive less, try to carpool more, make the extra effort to walk, bike, or take public transit if it is available?
I like the thought that we will rely dramatically less on cars not because of some painful upheaval, but as a result in a normal shift in priorities by our culture. As we value a simpler, less destination-oriented lifestyle, we will naturally relinquish our need to drive everywhere.
Shifting gears a little bit, I need to give a shout-out to my team at Carma Bay Area. We turned a case of upheaval (the recent BART strike) into a shining moment when the possibilities of our “transportation-options movement” came into focus.
We joined forces with our software partner, Avego (recently rebranded as Carma) to provide real-time carpools to stranded East Bay BART commuters. (Avego even gave a few of its new app users helicopter rides home!
During the 3-day strike, our team put in 15-hour days in the East Bay and San Francisco to make sure morning and evening commuters who wanted to carpool were covered. The results? We personally shared rides with hundreds of stranded commuters, and gained more than 2,000 new Avego app users!
That’s 2,000+ new members added to the Bay Area rideshare community! We hope many – if not all – of them will shift into a more regular ridesharing habit as a way to help our environment, reduce road congestion, and … picture this … have a little fun and rest and relaxation on their daily commutes.
As someone recently said to me: “Oh, I get it. You’re like Airbnb for commuters.” I love that!
Stay tuned, Bay Area – we could be heading into another BART strike on October 10. The Carma Team is ready to help you carpool: BartStrike.com.
This article was adapted from the Carma SF Bay blog.