Casual Carpool, the Bay Area’s Quirkiest Commute, Is Having a 2025 Revival Relaunch

If you’ve been waiting for the return of the casual carpool, or if you’ve been dying to try it out, this is your moment.

On Tuesday, a campaign to bring back the Bay Area tradition — a completely organic system of riding with strangers to get across the bridge faster and for cheap — after a five-year hiatus caused by the pandemic is staging a relaunch at a single location in Oakland’s Grand Lake neighborhood.

The effort’s main organizer said she hopes — and believes — it will be the start of a renaissance for the communal commute mode in which San Francisco-bound drivers once picked up complete strangers from East Bay street corners to take advantage of carpool lanes to and around the Bay Bridge toll plaza.

Camille Bermudez, a merchandiser for a San Francisco apparel company, started casual carpooling as a teenager, riding across the bay to her San Francisco high school with her father, Carlos. She said her fond memories of that experience, and the desire to have more commute options from her home in Alameda, drove her to try to resurrect carpooling.

Earlier efforts to attract drivers and riders back to casual carpooling came up short. But Bermudez said a number of factors are coming together to make the time ripe for a revival.

“Part of what’s changing now is that there are a lot more return-to-office mandates,” she said in an interview. “So just as we were told 5 years ago to stay home, we’re also now being told, ‘Time to start coming back into the office.’ That’s part of why we think now is the perfect time to bring casual carpool back.”

She also points to the fact that solo commuters driving electric cars will lose their privileged access to carpool lanes next month. She said she thinks that rising bridge tolls are making people more open to a famously low-cost commute option that, on its best days, is faster than public transit across the bay.

Carpool drivers pay half of the current Bay Bridge toll of $4. Depending on the driver, riders may kick in a dollar for their ride and often pay nothing.

“So time savings, flexibility, cost savings — all reasons for casual carpool and its return,” Bermudez said.

She said she’s encouraged by the results of a survey she posted on Reddit earlier this summer that indicated wide interest in trying casual carpooling, including among those who have never taken a ride-with-a-stranger trip.

The feedback Bermudez got from the survey led her to set Aug. 12 as the relaunch date, initially for two locations in Oakland and one in Berkeley. She’s since narrowed the focus for Casual Carpool 2.0 to a single site — the parking lot at Lake Park and Lakeshore Avenue in Oakland’s Grand Lake neighborhood. She said her survey showed that location had the highest number of potential drivers and riders.

Bermudez said she’ll consider the effort successful if that first pickup point is “up and running, and running beautifully — where both driver and passenger can find somebody to do their ad hoc carpool.”

Over the longer term, she envisions a community-driven effort to resurrect more of the area’s 20-plus former carpool spots and for the system to become self-sustaining, just like in pre-pandemic days.