The sign at the station on the way to work said $3.29 for regular on April 6. I wrote it in the notebook with a little box around it, which is what I do when a number makes me mad. In December I was paying $2.69.
That same week, Andre and I were standing in the break room at the terminal, and he said the thing we'd both been thinking for about a year: "We live six blocks apart, work the same shift and drive the same road. Why are we doing this in two trucks?" I didn't have a good answer.
Andre is a dispatcher like me, same 6:30 to 3:00 shift, same building on the east edge of St. Joseph off US-36. He lives on the north end, six blocks from us. Our commutes are the same 11 miles each way.
We share two days a week. I drive Monday and Wednesday, he drives Tuesday and Thursday, and Friday we each take our own, because Fridays are when one of us usually gets stuck late finishing the week's paperwork. On-call Saturdays aren't part of the deal.
Two shared days a week sounds small, but it's 40 percent of my commuting days handed to somebody else's gas tank, and the same for him. Neither of us owes the other anything, because we're trading the same miles.
What it saves
My Silverado gets about 16 mpg on the commute, a number I've tracked for years now. At $3.29 a gallon, the 22-mile round trip costs $4.52 a day in gas.
Two days a week is about 104 days a year, or roughly 8.7 days a month. Here's the monthly math:
- Miles I don't drive: about 191
- Gallons saved at 16 mpg: about 12
- Gas saved at $3.29: about $39
- Oil and tire wear at roughly a penny a mile: about $2
- Total: about $41 a month
That's close to $500 a year if prices stay here, and I don't think they're coming down soon. It also keeps about 2,300 miles a year off a truck that just turned 145,000. That's the number I like even more. Every mile I don't put on the Silverado is a mile closer to the next repair that I don't have to pay for yet.
Andre drives a smaller SUV that does better than my truck, so his savings per day are a little less than mine. He says he's happy with the deal, mostly because riding in my truck means he can drink his coffee without spilling it on his own seats.
The two rules
We've both been in carpools that fell apart. Usually it isn't about money. It's about waiting, and about feeling like the other guy is getting the better end. So we agreed on two rules before the first morning.
Rule one: the driver leaves at 6:05. Not 6:06. If you're not on the curb, the driver texts once and waits until 6:10, and after that you drive yourself and nobody's mad. We've used the grace period exactly once in two weeks. It was me. My boot was in the garage and I was looking for it in the house.
Rule two: nobody keeps score. If one of us misses a day for a dentist appointment or a sick kid, we don't swap a day back or pay gas money. Over a year it evens out, and the minute you start tracking who owes who a ride, it stops being worth it.
There's a third rule we didn't write down: the driver picks the radio. Andre likes sports talk. I like the farm report. We've both learned something.
Two weeks in
It's working. The drive takes the same 20-some minutes either way, but it goes faster with somebody to talk to. We hash out the day's freight before we're in the building, which means we're both a little sharper by 6:30. On my driving days, I still watch the shoulders on US-36 the same way. Andre spots deer better than I do, and he's been told so.
I'm not going to pretend $41 a month changes our lives. But when gas jumped 60 cents since December, it was one thing I could do about it that didn't involve buying a different vehicle. Whatever gas does, two of my five commutes now cost me nothing. We'll keep it going till somebody moves.