I can’t remember a time before I drove that I wasn’t in a carpool. I have such strong bonds with the families that I carpooled with from elementary school and beyond and even continued to carpool with them after I got my license. The convenience of carpooling is incomparable. However, something that isn’t usually a motivator of carpooling is its effect on the environment. It would make sense that minimizing the number of cars on the road would positively impact the environment, but how much of a difference does it make?

According to statistics published on the Rideshare Company website, a company promoting and encouraging carpooling, the average American spends over 430 hours driving every year. In a single year, a passenger car emits around 10,000 pounds of carbon dioxide, 600 pounds of carbon monoxide, and consumes around 550 gallons of gasoline. The average American household consumes over 1100 gallons of gasoline annually. Pretty disturbing statistics, right? What can we do to bring these numbers down? The answer is clear, we can start making a combined effort to carpool!

 

Before we get into any more statistics, we should start at the beginning. What is carpooling? Carpooling is the practice of more than one passenger traveling in a single car. It is a reasonable and practical way to travel! You can carpool on a need basis, a great way to start this would be starting a carpool to and from work. A lot of people take the same route to work, imagine what difference it could make if people began to go in the same vehicle. Carpooling also does not need to be for the entirety of the journey, people can be dropped off on the driver’s way to their destination. Carpooling can be organized online these days. Many websites offer carpooling facilities for people traveling along a common route and its free to join these websites!

All right, carpooling and the environment. What’s the deal? The United States ranked second in the world for total energy consumption in 2010.  The United States is also the largest consumer of transportation energy. A major chunk of this transportation energy is consumed by privately owned vehicles that run on gasoline. Gasoline is essentially a non-renewable source of energy. At the current rate of consumption, not only the United States, but many countries all over the world may soon begin to suffer from a gasoline crisis. Though it seems a small step to take, carpooling will help to conserve non-renewable energy sources like gasoline and diesel. However, it is not enough to simply use less fuel. It is equally important to optimize fuel usage. Carpooling also involves the efficient consumption of fuel. Regardless of whether or not there is one person in the car or four, the car will require the same amount of gas to travel from one place to another. Why not use it efficiently then? If the same amount of gasoline can help four people to reach work on time, why not? Making a group errand to the mall or supermarket is also a great way to save some fuel!

Carpooling means less pollution! When carpooling, more people are in a single car and less cars are out on the road! This means there is less air pollution, less noise pollution, less carbon emissions, and less greenhouse gas emissions. This means that carpooling is a direct step towards a cleaner and greener environment. We can do a lot of things to lessen the affects that pollution has on us such as purifying water and blocking out sound, but we cannot control the air that we breathe. Why not make an effort to help reduce the air pollution? Notice the difference in the graph below between solo drivers and cars with 3 or more occupants.

Here’s a less known one. When I was doing an internship with a professor at UNCC over the summer a while ago he was talking to me about the efficiency that self-driving cars could bring. When looking for a parking space, we often spend a lot of time driving in circles and leaving our engine running, thus increasing our emissions into the atmosphere. Having a self-driving car helps to minimize this as these cars are able to quickly pinpoint open spaces and maneuver towards them immediately. Carpooling results in something very similar. Carpooling results in a more efficient use of land, it could potentially minimize a lot of the land that is taken up by parking lots of open up a lot of new spaces! So not only will less cars be on the road, but less cars will be driving around in circles in full parking lots looking for a space.

 

Basically all I am saying is, join a carpool! It’s good for the environment in so many ways and convenient for you. You may find that speaking with your carpool is one of the best parts of your day.