Petrol prices driving California strangers to carpool

By Amanda Beck

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - High petrol prices are driving strangers into each others' cars in San Francisco.

Car-pooling is a suspect term in most of the United States for anyone beyond grade school, but in the San Francisco Bay Area commuters for years have used "casual carpools," where drivers eager to avoid tolls and cut travel time pick up strangers waiting in lines on corners.

With gasoline nearing $5 (2.5 pounds) a gallon in California, a lot more people are giving the system a try.

Four or five would-be passengers used to stand in line at 9 a.m., when Maruf Khan, 48, arrived for a ride at the corner near his house, but now the number can be as high as 20, he said.

"When I first started riding, the line of cars would go around the corner," said agreed Jon Jackson, 54, who has ridden in casual carpools for about eight years. "Now, it seems like the riders are the ones having the long lines," he said.

Traffic is lighter, riders and drivers say, even accounting for the typical summer slowdown, and they blame fuel prices.

The Washington, D.C. area has a similar system, in which riders are known as "slugs," but the idea of car-pooling draws blank stares in other parts of the country.

Rider Linda Carrillo remembers telling her sister in Richmond, Virginia about it. "She just thinks it is the most bizarre thing in the world. That it would never go over in Richmond -- people would never get in the car with strangers."