In valley, fuel prices spur car pooling, making friends out of strangers

By Mike Trask

Tuesday, July 22, 2008 | 2 a.m.

At 6:49 a.m. Monday, Maria Bittner backs her 4,700-pound Hummer out of her garage.

This week it’s her turn to drive.

She uses about $6.25 worth of gas each day for her 23-mile round-trip commute from her home near Eastern Avenue and Robindale Road to Henderson City Hall, on Water Street. That’s about $25 per four-day workweek to fuel the SUV.

But next week it’ll be free.

Before driving to work, she picks up her car-pooling partner, Gloria Vargason, who’s leaving her hulking Cadillac Escalade at home.

Next week, she drives.

These women were total strangers five weeks ago. Expensive gas brought them together.

That’s the effect the rising cost of fuel is having in Las Vegas, which embraces the West Coast car culture and defines mass transit as the elevator that takes you from the lobby to the mezzanine.

But now, in a town where neighbors seem to have little use for each other, strangers want to share one of the most personal of spaces — the front seat.

It’s a social shift an increasing number of us are willing to make.

About 19,000 people — a record number — have signed up for car pooling through the Regional Transportation Commission’s 9-year-old Club Ride program.

The list would be even longer, Club Ride organizers say, if more people would just trust each other. (To address one of those concerns — being stranded at work with no ride home — Club Ride will pay for a cab ride for the stranded.)

Getting car poolers to be friendly to each other may be a little harder.

“It’s more difficult to meet people here,” said Bittner, a planning analyst from Wisconsin. “People are just not that sociable. I don’t know all my neighbors, and I’ve been here seven years.”

But now, through car pooling, she’s met Vargason, a City Hall accounting clerk.

Bittner knew she had to find a car-pooling candidate when last month she was parking her metallic H3 in the Henderson City Hall parking garage. Two other monstrous vehicles pulled in.

A lone woman hopped from each gas guzzler. Bittner had an epiphany.

“Here we are paying $4 a gallon for gasoline, driving these big trucks and driving by ourselves,” she said.

It seemed ridiculous. So Bittner looked over an e-mail list of Club Ride members at City Hall. About 300 employers across the Las Vegas Valley — including Henderson — have Club Ride lists.

Vargason lived in the same ZIP code area, so Bittner sent her an e-mail. By that afternoon, the two mothers of grown children were having coffee. The next week they were car pooling.

“I think I really lucked out,” Bittner said.

These arrangements can continue for years and lead to lasting friendships. Charity Grano and co-worker Chris Barefield have been commuting 15 miles to their Bechtel offices in Summerlin for more than three years.

“When I was looking for someone, I figured if I could find someone who works at the same company as me, then I’d be OK,” she said. “The people I work with aren’t too weird.”

For Grano, sharing a ride in her Toyota Corolla isn’t about money as much as about not wasting valuable resources.

But she’s noticed more of her friends taking an interest in sharing rides since gas passed the $4 mark.

There is one more reason for her to ride with a friend now. This year the state opened its first high-occupancy vehicle lane on U.S. 95 between the Spaghetti Bowl and Lake Mead Boulevard. Grano drives on a section of that car-pool lane every day.

This is the fifth week Bittner and Vargason have been driving together, and with each trip they become better friends. On Monday morning they chatted about Vargason’s family reunion in Utah over the weekend and how much Bittner liked “The Dark Knight,” the new Batman movie.

“The ride seems so much shorter when you’re with someone,” Vargason said from the passenger seat.

At 7:06 they pull into the parking garage and say goodbye. They’ll reconnect in the afternoon for the ride home.

This is their new routine. Vargason and Bittner each save about $50 per month, and they enjoy each other’s company.

“Sometimes we’ll just keep talking in front of one of our houses,” Bittner said.