Wanted: Road pal for that long haul

RIDE sharing is enormously popular in Europe, where gasoline often tops $4 a gallon. On bulletin boards all over the Continent, people list auto trips they plan to take for vacation or other purposes and then ask whether someone else would like to share travel costs.

Reducing the expense of long car trips has also led to the creation of a popular European website called www.compartir.org (using the Spanish word for “to share”).

Travelers who visit the site can find car trips planned for places that include Finland, Bosnia and Ukraine.

In the United States, where long car trips used to be relatively inexpensive, the ride-sharing notion largely has been confined to daily commutes.

But vacation ride sharing has come of age with an eruption of ride-sharing requests on the mammoth Craigslist.org.

Go to www.losangeles.craigslist.org, then click on “rideshare” in the “community” box and you’ll see multiple opportunities for almost every month.

“Looking for a ride to Texas/Mexico at Christmastime,” reads one entry. “Need help driving from New York City to California in about five days,” says another. “Driving to Las Vegas on or around December 4,” writes another person searching for someone to share driving and costs.

Click on any of these requests, and you can then view the specifics, followed by an e-mail address to which you may respond, “I am willing to share your expenses and help with the driving,” or “I am looking for someone to accompany me on the road trip to share conversation, music, gas and hotel costs.”

In ride sharing, Craigslist is a johnny-come-lately compared with such specialized sites as www.erideshare.com, which claims to be “the top cross-country rideshare site in the U.S. and Canada.”

Ride sharing, the site says, “is cheaper than Greyhound or Amtrak. By splitting fuel expense and tolls, you can travel 300 miles for about $10 in a 30-mpg vehicle.... Greyhound and Amtrak charges on these routes are, respectively, $32.85 and $38 for St. Louis to Chicago, $30 and $64 for New York to Boston.”

Search engines quickly will turn up dozens of similar (and, it’s claimed, free) services (simply insert the word “ridesharing”). Some are restricted to particular U.S. regions, others supply ride-share opportunities in a foreign country (like www.rideabout.com.au, for travelers seeking to carpool in Australia).

Faced with a variety of such services, the cost-conscious traveler might want to begin the quest with Craigslist.org and ERideShare.com.

In travel, there’s always a cheaper way to get from here to there.