I’m trying to write a new post but it seems like every blog drafting client I use is full of old almost finished posts. Here’s one from 2022 or so that I’ve cleaned up. I’m not entirely happy with it; I feel like I didn’t do enough to justify my conclusion that the current status quo is worse, but I also don’t want to work on this post anymore and done might be better than perfect.
I first moved to Waterloo from Toronto in September 2015, for university. For the first term, I used the chartered bus service ran by the undergraduate student union, which was called Fedbus. I think the rates were pretty good, something like $12 for a one way trip and $20 for a round trip. Chartered school buses would pick us up from campus and drop us off at a specific destination. Each destination had its own bus, so it was a direct route. There would typically be one trip offered on Friday evening, and another offered Sunday afternoon.
Taking the public transit option would have been the range of ~$16 one-way, and also an hour and a half longer (3.5 hours, compared to 2 hours), so using Fedbus was a no-brainer.
Over the first winter break, an upperclassman (family friend) clued me in to the carpool network. What this was was a Facebook group that had like 30,000 members1. On Fridays and weekend days there would be ~30 posts per day, with the majority being Toronto <> Waterloo routes. On weekdays, it would be more like 10 posts a day. Still, definitely enough to catch a ride to the city whenever you wanted, basically.
Self-indulgent BOTEC:
30 trips a day posted on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays (90 total)
10 Trips a day posted Mondays-Thursdays (40 total)
95% of the time, it was a full car - meaning 4 passengers and a driver. The other 5% Of the time there were 3 passengers. I've never travelled in a car less full than that, but perhaps the weekday trips would have more sparse passenger amounts. I'll set the average number of passengers per trip at 4.5.
That means ~585 people were using the carpools to travel on a weekly basis.
Riding in a car was a much more comfortable experience than the school buses, and also cut the trip down another 30 minutes (to 1.5 hours each way), so from then on like 95% of my intercity trips were through carpool.
There were a few conventions:
- Drivers would post their rides generally the day before their trip, or sometimes day-of if it was an afternoon or evening trip.
- The driver would post where they are driving to, and the time that they were departing.
- Locations were precise and standard.
- There were two “standard” pickup spots in Waterloo: “Behind the Burger King” (a plaza right beside the University of Waterloo campus) and “At the 7/11 Parking Lot” (a plaza kitty corner to the Wilfrid Laurier University campus). People who wanted a carpool would specify which location they would be at at the pick up time. Most drivers were ok picking up people at both; the two locations were 5 minutes away from each other. Both pickup spots were easily accessible via transit.
- I would say something like 60% of the trips went to either Fairview Mall (specifically in the passenger drop-off area near the subway station) or Scarborough Town Centre (specifically, beside the movie theatre), which were both malls built on top of transit hubs in east Toronto. Also both very close to my parents’ place, so it worked really well for me.
- It worked the same way in reverse – if the pick up point was at STC, you’d know to wait by the movie theatres, and you would have the choice of getting dropped off by the Burger King or the 7/11.
- The rest was a mix between like, downtown Toronto, various Toronto exurbs, and a few other close by cities like London or Hamilton. Near extended holidays such as Christmas break or Easter, you’d see a couple posts for round trips to further locations, such as Ottawa (8 hours away), Kingston (6 hours away), and Windsor (6 hours away). These had less standard drop off locations.
- Generally, carpoolers were there early. Being late by ~10 minutes was fine, between 10-20 was considered quite rude, and generally the driver was unwilling to wait over 20 minutes and would leave without you. The drivers generally got there within 10 minutes of the posted time.
- The cost was $15 per trip for Toronto <> Waterloo, no matter how nice your car was. What this meant practically was that if you get one rider, you got gas covered. Any more riders past that point was additional money in your pocket.
- Occasionally, there would be a post that says “no middle seat” – meaning that they would only take 3 carpoolers, so no one has to sit in the middle seat in the back row. Nice carpool drivers wouldn’t charge extra for it, but some used it to raise their price to $20 per ride, which was also considered fine.
I would say there was something like a 10% reduction in activity every year between 1st and 4th year due to younger people being less likely to use Facebook. Still, it was very usable throughout the entirety of my undergrad2.
One week before finals season in my final term, the first covid lockdown happened. I moved back to my parents’ place in Toronto to try to find a job. By the time I got an offer and moved back to Waterloo, one year later, the established culture had completely faded.
Prices went up, and the going rate was more like $20-25 per trip. This was fine, I think the $15 price basically stuck around due to inertia and was due for an upwards re-adjustment. (Now, $30-35 has become standard.) Postings became much fewer in number.
The worse thing was the loss of common knowledge around the default drop off and pick up points. Instead, the convention is now for “door to door” service. I find this to be awful! People have to drive to a bunch of suburban locations, and easily add 30-45 minutes to each trip on both ends, making what should be a 1.5 hour trip into a 3 hour one on a regular basis.
I think what happened was that during the pandemic, carpools became quite rare and restricted to only maybe one passenger, which meant that it both made sense for the price to be raised, and also providing door to door service instead of drop off/pick-up at a conventional schelling point made sense. This is just speculation though, I can’t verify whether or not this is true.
But now it’s normal again for there to be a full car of 3-4 carpoolers, and providing door to door service for all of them is very suboptimal now imo. It introduces quite a few frictions – the driver gives different ETAs for each person and then if one person is late it holds up the entire group, it doesn’t save time on average, and the driver needs to learn a new route every time they pick up passengers, instead of just going to the same established mall plazas in city 1 to pick up all of their passengers, driving to the established plazas in city 2, and then heading off to their end destination.
This doesn’t really matter though, because the posting rate has reduced to something like 1-2 a day, which means it’s no longer viable to snag a seat for a ride in the very most optimal time for you3. Facebook’s a ghost town these days!
At the same time, the province has invested a bit more into intercity transit, bringing the average trip length down to like 3 hours. Nowadays, I suck it up and take that instead.
- Facebook was still incredibly popular and active in 2015, and I can write an entire other post about university facebook group infrastructure. Something like 90% of my program was in the “y program class of 20xx” facebook group with each other. The student housing group had 70,000 people. These groups were incredibly active and brought immense value to students as clearinghouses of various sorts – housing, class notes, “campus events with free pizza”, other socials, buy/sell groups, etc. ↩︎
- In general, Facebook groups for carpools are full of scammers. This was basically entirely solved in this carpool group however, because (1) it used some sort of university group infrastructure that locked the group to people with verified emails with the university subdomain, and (2) there were also some pretty active mods who would ban people and release PSAs on the rare occasions of reported scamming/harassment/etc. ↩︎
- 30 postings on travel days, generally leaving between 4 and 10pm (with a reasonable number of outliers for people with no classes or extreme night hours) generally means you can find a ride leaving every 30 minutes or so during peak hours. ↩︎
