It just frosts my cheapskate Scotch-Irish economic cookies to spend $7.38 every day in direct gasoline costs to commute from El Granada to Burlingame.

I drive over Highway 92 and it is not lost on me that asking a 15 year old van with 210,000 miles to climb a 900 foot mountain pass twice a day is pretty darn close to flogging the elderly.

I tried finding alternate rides and it strikes me that current cell phone and computer technology could make ride sharing work.

Ride sharing solutions so far are:

    Ask people at work. Result, rides exist but the drive times are different.
    Sign up at 511.org. Very clumsy program.

    Meanwhile: Think about the possibilities of matching rides and riders for the thousands of vehicles that drive through the intersection of Main Street and Highway 92. Imagine you lay out a Peninsula road map and drop 500 pinto beans over the junction of Highway 92 and Freeway 280. For every bean, the nearest neighbor bean is a ride share possibility with somebody that drove over the hill within 10 minutes of you.

    I think it would be a very interesting problem to model the ride matching problem. The book Great Ideas in Operational Research (a Dover book) has several examples to use as starting material.

  Lets look at the problems that need to be solved for ride sharing to become an aggressive success:

      The person driving the car needs to get some money for sharing. With a $7 to $8 gasoline cost per trip, how about $2.50 per rider.

      The rider needs to be well matched with the driver. Share rides need to end on the same path.

      Need painless and fair payment .

      The rider needs a return ride solution.

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      The outlines of a solution are this.

      Part of the Highway 92 parksite becomes a ride sharing parking lot. The entrance to the parking lot has a laptop computer with a webcam that picks up the license plate of each person who parks and wants a ride. The parking is metered to collect $2.75 per day.
 
      At Main Street and Highway 92 we set up a laptop computer with a webcam that runs a license plate recognition program.

      Any registered driver going across Main Street gets a “rider ready for pickup” phone call.

      Every driver leaving the pickup area with a passenger gets a $2.50 gasoline card credit.

      People register using cell phones with GPS. The system calls you at work to get the GPS coordinates of your destination.

      Register for a return ride by calling from the pickup point.

I’d like to find a group of people and a sponsoring organization to do an advanced technology ride sharing project.

A simple assembly of information system machinery and some astute marketing could produce immediate cash economy to the rider and the driver. Every dollar not spent on gasoline is available for local shopping: groceries, magazines, books and art.

Suppose a ride shared eliminates $4.00 in direct gasoline cost for the rider. The rider pays $2.75 for the ride, the driver receives a $2.50 gas card when he boards a rider, and the city gets $.25 for the parking space. Repeat that 300 times a day on highway 92. And do it for 250 days a year.

The cash benefits are: $93,750 not spent on gasoline (gas cost minus ride payment), $187,500 in gas card credits paid to drivers, $18,750 parking revenue to the city.

i recommend the book “the end of oil” available from the Library for a sane summary of the multiple colliding resource systems.

The theme for the next 20 years appears to be “transitional systems”. Ride sharing is a transitional system. Ride sharing is a good way to make better use of our resources and ride sharing is a way to live better on less. 

I invite people interested in doing a project to email me using the profile link email address.

I wouldn’t mind having those shuttle busses starting in Montara, picking up riders along Hwy 1, pick up & drop off in HMB (Strawflower, Main St.), and then over the hill to the park ‘n ride lots, CalTrain, and/or SamTrans connections.

Another possibility:  A registry for Coastside commuters so we can show a sign—for hitch-hiking—indicating that we’re safe.

With about 85% of Coastside residents living within 0.5 miles of Hwy 1, the Coastside is tailor-made for public transportation.  It’s a no-brainer.

Shuttle busses & drivers would be a much better investment than widening Hwy 1 to four lanes!

—Dan

What an interesting idea!  Sort of a match.com, without the speed dating. Sounds like a great project for a budding software developer.  The issue is the money side. 

Maybe the matchmaker could take a percentage (say 1%) of projected commuting expenses :).