Everyone Into the Pool!

This is Rideshare Week, when we are encouraged to give up our mornings of commuting solitude and ride to work with someone else. The trade-off is less traffic and better air.

The people who promote Rideshare Week at the Southern California Assn. of Governments (SCAG) deserve our support for a thankless task. To take any nitpicking potshots at them seems almost unfair.

Almost.

Even do-gooders can get a little carried away. Each year, I wince at the suggestions the Rideshare Week people come up with so companies can help promote the cause. Frankly, some are a bit of a hoot.

Here are a few from SCAG’s magazine, Crossroads:

Three-legged races. “What says ride-sharing better,” according to Crossroads, “than people teaming up together to get to their destination. At your ride-share event, include a three-legged race and call it ‘people-pooling.’ ”

Somehow, I just can’t picture a bunch of Fluor engineers jumping into gunny sacks together over car-pooling.

And another: Guessing famous car-poolers. “Here’s a game that really gets people mingling,” Crossroads states. I’ll bet.

If you’re stumped on that one, the promoters point out Batman & Robin, Aldrin & Collins on the moon, and perhaps the most famous car-poolers of all, Bonnie & Clyde.

The promotions go on with “The Vanpool Cram,” “Commute Taboo” and “Rideshare Pictionary.”

Call SCAG if you’re so hot for these at your company that you want more details.

But beyond this bit of tomfoolery, these folks have a powerful message we’d better heed as we approach the next millennium: Too many of us are out there competing for road space.

By 2020, the Southland’s population will jump from 15 million to 22 million, according to SCAG’s regional transportation plan. As it states in Crossroads, that’s like adding two Chicagos to the region.

We all know car-pooling can help cut traffic. So how do you persuade people to partake? Well, maybe a Rideshare Week.

Unfortunately, it’s one of those gimmicky weeks that’s easy to ignore as we tackle our usual daily obstacles. But here’s an eye-catching statistic: A Caltrans study shows that among those who participate in Rideshare Week for the first time, more than half continued to share some of their daily commutes with another driver.

Still, it’s a hard task to drive down the number of single drivers on the road. The latest available (1996) SCAG report puts single drivers at 81% in Orange County. That’s down just four percentage points from 1992. Also, Orange County has the lowest carpool occupancy of the six counties in the Southland at 2.3 riders (Imperial County is highest at 2.9).

Let’s be honest: We don’t carpool more often because we hate inconvenience. My wife and I work in the same office, basically work the same hours, yet we rarely carpool. It has to do with our youngsters’ schedules, our transportation needs during the workday, and her refusal to give in to my passion for morning radio’s Don Imus. But others are more willing to make the sacrifice to reduce traffic.

People like Christina Bindl of Lake Elsinore, who works for Ameriquest Mortgage Co. in Orange.

Bindl starts her day car-pooling--to the train station in Corona. She and her fellow car-poolers then take the train to the station in Orange. Which is exactly, she says, one mile to their office. They walk or take the bus the rest of the way. Three daily separate modes of transportation without solo driving.

“To me, driving alone is boring,” Bindl said. “Besides, I’m probably saving well over $1,000 a year on my car expenses.”

Then there is Pauline Correa of Yorba Linda. She happens to be a transportation coordinator for the Raytheon Corp., a defense contractor in El Segundo. But she’s also been a car-pooler the past 13 years while working there. Right now she’s riding in one of its bus pools.

For $135 a month each, Raytheon employees in the Yorba Linda-Fullerton area can take a company-chartered bus to work. Correa says the bus cuts commute time by about 45 minutes, because the bus can use the carpool lanes. Its riders also see it as considerable savings on their car experiences.

The bus holds 47 people; that means for the rest of us that there are 47 fewer vehicles on the road out of this one group. Here’s another bonus for the bus-poolers. What do passengers do on the bus, I asked her.

“Sleep!” was her resounding answer. “In the mornings, we all sleep. In the afternoons, we visit or read, but even then many of us catch some extra sleep.”

Roy Heatherington of Orange, who works for Bergen & Brunswig Pharmaceutical in that city, has never driven there to work. He bicycles, takes a bus or walks.

“Driving to work means you’re usually stressed out before you get there,” Heatherington said. “Since I’ve stopped driving, I show up without stress.”

All of which makes me a little sheepish that I haven’t made more of a car-pooling effort. If you aren’t sure how to go about hooking up with some type of ride-sharing to work, here’s an easy number to help: (800) COMMUTE. I called that number and got more than 20 options just on bicycling.

Whether we resort to bicycles, trains or buses, it’s pretty clear we’ve got to do something. Unless we change our ways, our roads just won’t be ready for two more Chicagos.

Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling the Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823 or by fax at (714) 966-7711, or jerry.hicks@latimes.com