SECOND OPINIONS : Time to Join a Car Pool and Enjoy Life in the Fast Lane : A new ride-sharing lane on a stretch of the Ventura Freeway is greeted with indifference. When will Southlanders finally discover the advantages?

Together my husband and I have gone through a lot of firsts together. We were the first in our respective families to attend college and the first among our professional friends to be published. We were even the first of our friends to pack our degrees in our pockets and move to Los Angeles. Last month we added another first to our list of accomplishments: We were the first people in the San Fernando Valley to officially drive the newly opened Ventura Freeway car-pool lane from Pasadena to Studio City as we followed the road maintenance truck down the freeway collecting orange cones.

Don’t say that’s nothing to write home about. We did. Car-pool lanes are big news in Cleveland, where I grew up. Unfortunately, it seems more people from Cleveland will ride in our car-pool lanes than people from California. Why isn’t anyone else on them? Why hasn’t car-pooling caught on?

I’ve heard most of the excuses over and over again: No one goes exactly my way, I work an erratic schedule, I need my car at work for emergencies regarding my school-age children. Guess what? Many of those excuses can be overcome.

The Southern California Rideshare is available to connect you to people in your neighborhood who travel near to your place of business every day. They already have half a million people using their service, with work hours that range from the 6 a.m.-to-2:30 p.m. shift to the traditional 9 to 5. Sure, those people will be strangers, but what a great way to get to know new people in town. What a great way to save gas money and avoid wear and tear on your car. What a great way to talk out all the office nonsense you’re dealing with before you get there.

As to erratic schedules, companies with more than 100 employees are required to establish a traffic-reduction plan and eventually meet rush-hour ridership targets. In their effort to show support for commuting solutions, some are even willing to juggle things around to add another employee or two to their commuter lists. It can’t hurt to ask for changes in scheduling.

If you’re really lucky and you work in one of the local Fortune 500-type companies, the firm probably is offering some type of incentive plan to get you into a car pool. At some of these companies, car-poolers are allowed to accumulate points that can be traded in for company merchandise, such as videos or sweat shirts. What a great way to save on your holiday shopping.

And still, the car-pool lanes are empty. Rather than come up with creative solutions to filling them, I hear people complaining every day about why the lanes are there in the first place. Supposedly, if they were just normal traffic lanes, then all the congestion on the roadways would be miraculously cured and the commute from North Hollywood to Santa Monica would be 10 minutes. Right.

If we don’t start supporting car-pooling, if we don’t start experimenting with new modes of transporting, all of us around the Southland will have only ourselves to blame on that day, somewhere in the science-fiction future, when we have to buy our air in the same way some people now buy their water--bottled.

Somehow it seems easier for us to complain than to compromise and cooperate. That seems at the heart of so many of our urban ills, I’m not sure how to address it. All I can say is that we had fun zipping along at a comfortable clip. Won’t you join us next week? And the week after that?