I was without a car because I’d arrived at the conference by driving to Albany, N.Y., and then traveling by train, bus and by hitchhiking the last eight miles. The conference organizers had tried to make it easy for people to find rides with others. They had considerately set up a ride board where people could post message requests, and the evening’s master of ceremonies asked participants after the last talk to check the ride board and offer a ride with someone who needed it.
I thought I could just stand around and wait for my carpool to find me. The conference was on “Peak Oil and Community Solutions,” so the hundreds of people attending were interested in helping each other, I thought. My name, destination and cell phone number were on the ride board, which was on an easel just outside the auditorium where the evening’s talks were held.
Before long, I could see the plan wasn’t working. The people streaming out of the auditorium didn’t glance at the ride board; they simply continued out the building’s front doors. I started to picture myself in an empty building, at night, 10 miles from my motel with luggage and no car or bicycle to make the trip manageable.
Changing tactics, I started asking people at random if they could give me a ride to my motel. Everyone was friendly. Many people were going in a different direction, or their car was already full. I eventually found a ride with two people staying at the motel, but not before I had asked Miami Valley Regional Planning Commission staffer Bob Steinbach, who was heading in a different direction. The next morning, I was surprised to hear Steinbach tell the whole conference about our brief encounter.
Steinbach held a talk the following day on the importance of ride sharing as future gas supplies become pinched. He described many detailed plans for hooking riders up with drivers, some similar to VTrans’ Vermont RideShare. At the end, though, Steinbach highlighted a simple but very important shift that every individual can make: “Start to offer rides or ask for rides from people. That’s an unused skill.”
Nodding at me, Steinbach continued, “I had somebody ask me for a ride last evening here. It’s the first time in a long time that I had a stranger ask me for a ride. We’ve got to get back to thinking, ‘Can we ask each other for a ride?'”
Sure, I’m doing this transportation experiment, but mostly I thought I was just trying to bum a ride from the guy. It seemed that he saw me as some kind of pioneer in a necessary, new movement.
Bob Steinbach’s comments helped me see a lot of lessons for the much larger puzzle of how to motivate people to prepare for the declining availability of energy after peak oil. Asking strangers for a 10-mile ride to my motel was a small, easy step toward being able to travel when fuel is less available. The situation was more forgiving than it will be later; the gas stations of central Ohio had plenty of gas to sell. Even had I found no one driving to the motel who had room for me and my luggage, I’m confident I could have located a taxi.
Some lessons I drew from the experiment were:
Changing habits is hard. People are not used to offering rides to strangers, and it took a lot to get conference participants to offer me a ride. They ignored two reminders: The last thing that participants heard from the podium that night was that some people needed a ride to the motel, so please check the ride board if you’re going that way. And the ride board was just outside the auditorium, facing the main exit and impossible to miss if you were looking for it.
People respond to personal appeals. Everyone was friendly when I asked them for a ride, and it didn’t take long to find someone willing and able to fit me in, once I started asking.
People respond to need when they are aware of the underlying issues. The conference attracted people interested in community-based responses to energy scarcity after peak oil, so the people I approached were already thinking about the importance of helping each other to save fuel. I wonder what kind of reception my request would have received at a conference for, say, car manufacturers or coal company executives.
People adapt by using the habits and networks they already have. Conference participants were changing their lives to be less dependent on oil. It seemed that most people I talked to there had carpooled with someone they knew. Even if offering strangers a ride is outside their usual habits, everyone knows what it’s like to share a ride with someone they know.
Simple, small actions can be amplified. I quietly asked Bob Steinbach if he was going my way and could give me a ride, and the next day he used the exchange to exhort a room full of hundreds of people to ask strangers for rides or give rides to strangers. DVD sales of his talk will bring the message to even more people.
Community-based solutions can be fun. The two fellow conference-goers who drove me to our motel were peak oil organizers from Massachusetts. At the end of the conference, they offered me a ride back from Ohio to my car at the Albany train station. On the trip, we hatched plans for a couple joint events. I also had time to nap while they drove, so they got me home faster than I could have driven on my own, or than bus and train schedules would have permitted, and we had a delightful time together.
Meeting the challenges of energy scarcity following peak oil means fundamental changes in our lives: How we travel and how much we travel, how we heat our buildings, what work we do, where our food comes from, and many others. It’s important to be aware of the magnitude of the challenges and the power of working together in our communities to meet them. Habits are difficult to change, so now is the time to start, while relatively abundant oil gives us a safety net. And the sooner we start, the sooner we find how much fun it can be to start doing things cooperatively.
Carl Etnier, director of Peak Oil Awareness, blogs at vtcommons.org/blog and hosts the weekly radio show Relocalizing Vermont on WGDR, 91.1 FM Plainfield.
URLs
www.communitysolution.org
For a DVD of Bob Steinbach’s talk on some of the transportation alternatives in a post-peak oil world, or any of the other talks at the three-day conference, “Peak Oil and Community Solutions.”
www.vermontrideshare.org
VTrans’ site for finding carpools, vanpools, busses, and other transportation options.
www.carpoolworld.com
A site to help individuals, groups, and event coordinators to coordinate ridesharing; recommended by Bob Steinbach.
burlington.craigslist.org/rid
Craigslist offers a virtual ride board to match riders with drivers or people who need a car moved somewhere. This URL is the Vermont rideshare area; for longer trips, also check out the Craigslist rideshare page for your destination city or state.
