Emerging on foot from the early morning fog in the Grand Lake neighborhood of Oakland on Tuesday, Brionna Lewis waved to the small line of cars seeking passengers for a unique Bay Area carpooling tradition.
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“The first time I saw it, I was like, ‘What is that like? Why are people standing in line with all these cars picking them up?’ It looked like a school drop-off,” Lewis said after stepping into a 2017 Nissan Sentra. “But it’s just people helping people, solving problems that the government can’t.”
Lewis began using the unorthodox SF Casual Carpool when it resumed on August 12, after a 5-year hibernation that stemmed from the pandemic. While not overseen by a government body or company, this longtime Bay Area service connecting commuters who need carpoolers with other commuters who need a ride provides info for those who want to find a location at sfcasualcarpool.com.
SF Casual Carpool’s chief organizer Camille Bermudez brought back the Bay Area tradition of avoiding costly bridge tolls and crowded morning commutes into San Francisco. She said she had an “inkling” the public wanted Casual Carpool to return, so she sent out a community survey to get a sense of the public’s interest.
Casual carpool passenger Brionna Lewis exits a vehicle at the San Francisco drop off location on Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025, in San Francisco, Calif. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
“I put out a survey back on June 8 to understand if that appetite was still out there. Is this something that people even still want? Today, we proved that yes, it certainly can come back, and it certainly will come back,” Bermudez said on Aug. 12, the official relaunch of Casual Carpool.
Casual Carpool started over 40 years ago as a “fun and different way” to commute from the East Bay to San Francisco, according to Bermudez. It was of mutual benefit to drivers, who could save on tolls, and riders, who enjoyed the comfort and cost savings of being a passenger. Nearly 1 in 6 Bay Area commuters used carpooling in 1980, according to data from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Association of Bay Area Governments.
Bermudez said that Casual Carpool, at its peak, was used by thousands of people across 27 locations, although exact figures for its utility were not tracked. The number of people carpooling slowly dropped over the years, but still hung around 10% before the pandemic, according to MTC and ABAG. The pandemic forced the number of carpools to a new low in 2021 as just 7.2% of commuters used the tactic.
Jonathan Purkis, a sociologist and author of “Driving with Strangers: What Hitchhiking Tells Us About Humanity,” said the phenomenon’s return today follows historical precedent.
Purkis said the rise of the automobile in the 1920s and 30s brought out a “spirit of adventure” in Americans to ride with strangers and travel across the country for cheap, which was further encouraged by the U.S. government during World War II as a cost-saving measure.
The 1970s brought the dual challenges of the OPEC oil crisis and a 50% increase in bridge tolls — tough pills to swallow for many commuters, Purkis said. These economic hardships pushed people to adopt carpools.
“In every time and every era, hitchhiking has been associated with economic need,” Purkis said. “The whole thing about how you actually make ends meet, given all the pressures, is back on the agenda, isn’t it?”
The Bay Bridge toll has risen to $8, BART is running 100 fewer trains per week than before the pandemic, and inflation in the past 5 years has eaten into the finances of many Bay Area residents. Bermudez said she often experiences buses that are overfilled in Alameda, where she lives, so she’s taken up walking 25 minutes to an earlier stop to ensure her place on the bus.
Purkis said ridesharing has never been about a singular issue. Whether it’s to ease one’s commute via carpool lanes, or to shrink the financial burden of commuting, or to reduce vehicle emissions to support the environment, “everyone is just getting to work,” he said. He said Casual Carpool was an example of a “gift economy,” where services and goods are given out freely, without an explicit agreement for payment in return. In the past, riders were encouraged to give $1 or $2 for each ride, Bermudez said, but it’s still less than BART, San Francisco Bay Ferry or AC Transit.
A common theme expressed by the people interviewed about Casual Carpool’s return was a desire to rekindle the casual conversations and community that had been lost during the pandemic.
“In Oakland, I see a strong resurgence and appetite for community,” Lewis said. “Like, we can give each other rides, person to person, right? And it’s not a bus, it’s not any kind of super formal thing. It’s casual.”