Desperate, single driver looking for toll mate

By CHUIN-WEI YAP, Times Staff Writer
Published October 7, 2007

It was Commuter Choices Week last week, brought to you by Bay Area Commuter Services.

Bay Area what now?

That's what I said.

For a whole year, Mike Martin must have figured that's what everybody else said, too.

Martin is 55, lives in Odessa and works as an internal audit manager in Bradenton.

He liked the idea of carpooling to work, and found out many years ago that the nonprofit Bay Area Commuter Services offers a carpool matching service.

It's like personals, only for ride-along buddies. See www.tampabayrideshare.org,or pick up one of their quarterly Tampa Bay Commuter tabloids.

So he took an ad out: "FROM ODESSA WILL SHARE DRIVING Van Dyke and Dale Mabry to Bradenton ..."

Nothing happened.

"The ad never really worked," he said. "It's been there for a year."

He found two people in his company instead and carpooled with them.

But he ended it in two weeks, for two reasons:

First, it added an extra hour of detours to his workday, picking up and dropping off people. The other thing was, one of the carpoolers insisted on divvying up the cost by using IRS mileage rates and tried to be exact about how much each carpooler should pay for his or her leg of the journey.

Well, there's such a thing as being overly correct. Plus, Martin thought the guy was charging a little more than the going rate at the gas pump.

So ended his carpooling experience.

That's the fragility of the carpooling experiment for you. It's like a blind date, really.

Sandra Moody, the executive director of BACS, wants to tell Martin not to give up on carpooling based on his most recent attempt.

"I'd say he had a 50-50 experience, and unfortunately, that's a life issue," she said. "It's like going to a restaurant and getting bad service. If you get two bad services in a row, you will try some other place."

Moody has some tips for potential carpoolers:

"Meet someone in public," she said. "See if it jibes, personalitywise. We would encourage people not to give up on it just because you had the one not-so-good experience."

Well, Martin hasn't given up. Says he's still open to it, if he can find a good match.

After all, it's worked for him before, 10 years ago, commuting from Odessa to Sarasota with a South Tampa man. They alternated weekly in the driver's seat, so they didn't have to bother paying each other.

"That was fine," he said. "We had good conversations."

Still, with his latest attempt, a whole year went by without a single answer to his BACS ad.

And, here in Pasco, that's what a good chunk of the problem may be.

People don't know BACS.

During Commuter Choices Week, the good folks of BACS went to downtown Tampa, the Westshore business district, the University of South Florida, Clearwater and St. Petersburg. They handed out brochures promoting carpooling, bicycling and buses.

On their Web site, it says the agency also covers Pasco, Hernando and Citrus.

Moody said BACS hopes to organize an event in Pasco next year, but a lot of the federal funds her agency relies on somehow limit the expenses to Hillsborough and Pinellas.

Well, here in Pasco, two-thirds of working residents commute out of county. The roads are strung out. We're so desperate, we're talking about double-decking State Road 54.

Sounds like it should be prime nesting grounds for BACS.

Time to come up north.

Chuin-Wei Yap can be reached at cyap@sptimes.com or 813 909-4613.

[Last modified October 6, 2007, 20:27:58]