According to the NRDC: “Most cars on the road carry only one person. In fact, we have so much extra room in our 140 million cars that everyone in Western Europe could fit in them with us.” Crazy, right?
And according to this site, if every commuter car in the U.S. carried just one more person, we’d save eight billion gallons of gas a year.
Another interesting way to look at this: if you assume one gallon of gas is $3 (in many cities, it’s much higher. Just this past weekend, I paid $3.85/gallon), that means we, as consumers, would save $24B a year. $24B!
Yet another reason why we should all start carpooling more often.
How about this instead - what if we all drove smaller cars? I was in Japan a few months back, and all the cars there were about half the size of the cars here. I’m not sure why cars just keep getting larger and more powerful. Do family sedans really need 300 horsepower and 0 - 60 acceleration times under 5 seconds?
I totally agree with you on carpooling. We should all try doing it even once or twice a week if possible. BTW, many of these smaller cars I speak about still have plenty of room to carry 2 - 4 people.
Maybe the real problem is that we Americans are getting too big for our cars.