During commute hours, those seeking a ride to San Francisco arrive at the CCP stop on foot, while those with space in their cars come looking for riders. At my particular location, there is usually a line of cars waiting for passengers. When it is your turn, you hop into the first car in the queue, and off you go. By convention, the driver drops off his/her passengers at a standard location in downtown San Francisco. Barring a major accident, this takes about 15 minutes, substantially less time than driving on your own.

The CCP has been going on for a long time out here, and I am told there are similar opportunities for informal ridesharing in certain parts of the Washington, D.C., area (where the practice is known as "slugging") and taxi pooling from upper Manhattan down to Wall Street. Such transit arrangements work because for a small investment and risk, everyone gets something tangible and positive. In our CCP, the driver gets to go through the carpool lane onto the Bay Bridge (not only a much shorter time waiting in line but also free bridge toll), and the riders get a quick and free (!) ride to a central destination.

I do not know its history, but I have some idea of how the CCP may have started. Somewhere, long ago, a frustrated commuter who is tired of waiting in traffic decides to do something about it. Our pioneer pulls up at a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station, rolls down the window and cheerfully calls out to the would-be train riders: "Hey, how about a ride to San Francisco? I'm going that way, too. I won't charge you anything. It's a great deal!"

I envision the first potential passengers, hearing this odd offer and looking nervously at one another, and the first brave volunteers gingerly opening the car door, wondering what exactly they were stepping into. Once in the carpool lane on the freeway, there must have been a moment of collective realization and exhilaration when, while sailing past the stop-and-go traffic, everyone in the car suddenly realized that they had just scored a huge coup by banding together. No doubt there were high-fives all around when they parted ways in San Francisco. Driver and riders alike share the good news with their friends, neighbors and co-workers.

The rest is history. Today, there are dozens of well-established locations all over the East Bay (documented on several Web sites), a reliable stream of both riders and drivers, and a widely known etiquette about driver-passenger interaction (e.g. the first arriving passenger usually gets in the back seat, conversation is frowned upon unless initiated by the driver, the drop-off is always at the same place, etc.).

I love the Casual Carpool.

Common Thread


Over the past 18 months, I have done a fair amount of reading about biological models to describe economies, market phenomena and/or business operations, including:

• "Leadership and the New Science,"
  by Meg Wheatley
  
  
• "The Innovator's Dilemma,"
  by Clayton Christenson
  
  
• "The Nature of Economies,"
  by Jane Jacobs
  
  
• "The Tipping Point,"
  by Malcolm Gladwell
  
  
• "The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World,"
  by Michael Pollan
  
  
• "The Wisdom of Crowds,"
  by James Surowiecki

Each of these is an outstanding book and is worth far more discussion. However, I have found one common thread that runs through them all: diversity and discomfort together generate lots of attempts at change, most of which fail, and ultimately discovery and progress — but only under the right conditions. This evolutionary process is both innately wasteful and extraordinarily powerful. Moreover, it is somewhat counterintuitive to us O.R. types, for by its very nature it is not centered on efficiency or optimization.

To put it another way, nature is usually not looking for an optimal solution from a well-defined set of alternatives, nor is it trying to predict the performance of a system that follows a set of rules and known distributions. Instead, bewildered with what is painful and/or absurd, we tinker with our approach or even strike out boldly in many new directions. What takes root depends not only on the heartiness of the plant (as classic Darwinian thinking would have us believe) but also on the soil and climate into which it is cast.

This suggests that we should spend more time thinking about creating good conditions for the generation of possible solutions, not knowing a priori which of them might turn out to be the winner over time.

I would like to note that my beloved Casual Carpool would likely never have materialized without the right conditions being present: an obvious place to search for passengers, rising gas prices and a government-sponsored incentive for putting multiple people into a single car. But even under these conditions, no one considered ruthless value-creating as the CCP was just waiting to happen — until it did. And the benefits accrued by thousands every day — drivers, passengers and environmentalists alike — would still be a dream if an O.R. analyst had tried to design it.



Vijay Mehrotra (vjm@sfsu.edu) is a faculty member in the Decisions Sciences Group in the College of business at San Francisco State University, and an operations management consultant.

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