Susan Shaheen, the Transportation Sustainability Research Center’s co-director, discusses casual carpooling in Oakland, California.
Susan Shaheen may be more excited about the return of carpooling than even the members of SF Carpool. She’s dedicated a big chunk of her life to studying the phenomenon.
A professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley, Shaheen studied casual carpools in the 2000s as a response by transit users to BART strike threats. She was surprised to learn how significant carpooling was as a commuting strategy for many East Bay residents.
“ When I was doing this work about 10 years ago, what I was showing was that about 75% of the people who are using casual carpool would’ve taken public transit otherwise, but about 10% of the people were drivers,” Shaheen said. “So it was competing with public transit.”