Back in August, Alan assembled a crew of 5 co-workers to carpool from Knoxville to Jefferson Middle School in Oak Ridge. It took some persuading, some schedule juggling, and a spirited game of musical cars each morning in Alan's driveway to accommodate everyone, but they've gotten the logistics worked out and now they're having fun! For his role as the "transportation hub" Alan was nominated by fellow carpooler Kevin Webb, who thought he deserved the recognition for giving their carpool the time and place to make it work.
"Our entire carpool works at Jefferson Middle School in Oak Ridge and we all live off of Middlebrook Pike at various places in west Knoxville. I'm the librarian at JMS and I've worked there since 1985. My daughter, Jessica, became an English teacher in the fall of 2006 and she began driving to my home and we rode in together starting that fall.
For the last year or more I've tried to convince our good friends Kevin (5th grade teacher) and Lisa (6th grade teacher) to join us—even if it was one day a week. Our schedules don't match perfectly, so it involved some sacrifice on their part. This year they decided to try and once we started we became addicted to the idea and we tend to re-arrange everything else to work around the carpool, not the other way around. The four of us met at my house and I began shuffling cars in order to accommodate which car was going to Oak Ridge and to allow my wife to get her car out of the garage.
Sometime just after school started another friend, Janie (speech teacher) needed a ride because their car was wrecked. She and her husband bought the Camry Hybrid in the picture, but by the time they got it, Janie was hooked on the carpool as well. She only works at our school three days a week, so she can't ride with us everyday. With this many cars it has become a fun Rubicks Cube in our driveway/garage every morning. We have three incoming cars in addition to the two already here and two specific cars have to escape after all the others arrive, so around 6:15 every morning our neighbors probably think I'm crazy moving our cars out of the garage and leaving one or both garage doors open to insert other people's cars - but it is fun. We're anticipating the morning I get the pattern wrong and it all falls apart.
It has become a fun part of the day for all of us. We talk about work, of course, but also we have gotten to know each other better and we have great conversations about everything in the world with technological support provided by Janie and her web-enabled black berry to settle any disputes and provide needed information for the conversation. When she drives the new Camry, we all hold our breath hoping to get to the "Excellent" level on the in-dash gas mileage report!
As to why we started it, the reasons are part economic, part serendipity as you can see above, and a large portion of our motivation is concern for reducing our emissions to help the environment. I don't think falling gas prices will change anything about what we are doing because of that last part.
Thanks, Alan, for being such a wonderful Smart Trips ambassador. (And your carpool sounds like a lot of fun!)
