Carpool

Carpooling is a good idea if you're on a tight budget, don't have a car or just like to meet new people and travel with them for a while. Its a common practice to share the costs for petrol and other expenses like road tolls and driving as well. The other advantage is that you can use carpool lanes. Carpooling is very common between people who commute to their workplace together or between backpackers who are pretty flexible with dates and destinations.

Depending on what you wanna do, there are serval options to build or join your carpool:
If you wanna commute to work try out the local classifieds in your newspaper first, or your preferred classifieds website.
Here are some good places to start your search:
- craigslist.org is pretty much the bigges source for carpools within the United States. The carpool section can be found under community->rideshare. Most times you will find one-time trips, offers on a daily or weekly basis are not so common here.
- shareyourride.net is a great source for backpackers and independent travelers to find travel buddy's on your roadtrip. Quite popular in Australia, but you can also offer lifts for any other country.
- mitfahrzentrale.de
provides quite a lot of listings within Europe on a regular basis. Registration required to add your own listings or to reveal other members phone numbers, but contacting them is free.
- gumtree.com has a Rideshare section for some countries worth checking out as well.

Of course there are some more carpool websites out there, this is only a short list and covers most english speaking countries.

Here some tips for your trip:
- meet your carpool partner for a beer or coffee before you take the trip, consider an alternative if you don't feel comfy with the other person.
- of its gonna be a long trip, make sure you like the other persons music taste :)
- have a backup plan in case the car owner cancels the trip in the last minute
- most if you carpool with travellers and not with commuters, keep in mind that they might take a scenic route and the trip takes much longer.
- always respect the car owners property, don't drive like if it is your own car.

Have a good trip!