Frugal Traveler: Taking Ride-Share Services for a Spin

If you followed my summer road trip from Baton Rouge, La., to Fargo, N.D., you may have wondered how I got from New York to my starting point in the first place. I drove 20 hours. Alone. It was far cheaper than flying into Louisiana — then having to rent a car, pay a (huge) drop-off fee in North Dakota and fly home.

I had hoped for company, to split both the driving and $175 or so in gas and tolls. So about a week before my trip, I posted my route on three ride-share sites: Zimride.com, eRideShare.com and Ridester.com. And got not a peep.

With economic pressures pushing travelers to share resources whenever possible (and various online services making that ever easier), I wondered how this was possible. Did I do something wrong? Were the sites inadequate? Or were there simply not enough people out there looking for such a ride? The answer turned out to be a bit of each. Ride-sharing's move from campus bulletin board to Internet had been less successful than expected. And though it's still a potential moneysaver for travelers, that's mostly for distances easily covered in a day. So what could I have done better?

My first mistake: not posting everywhere I should have. I did the right thing by listing my ride — at no charge — on the sites mentioned above. But I missed the biggest player in the game: crusty old Craigslist. Sure, it lacks maps or calendars or user profiles or reviews or a way to pay in advance by credit card — and, not incidentally, there's little recourse if things go wrong. But it has the rides: more, and more widespread, at least based on my unscientific survey, than the other sites.

Luckily, the second-biggest number of listings seem to be on the most user-friendly site, Zimride. The process for listing and booking rides is roughly similar to that for rooms on Airbnb.com, although Zimride doesn't take a cut, so you can choose between booking online or contacting the driver directly to make arrangements. Other great features: its profiles are Facebook-connected (meaning you can do a little online research into your potential travel partners), and its algorithm often matches people with different but potentially overlapping routes. (For example, it might have found me someone who was going from Baltimore to Atlanta, a nice chunk of my journey.)

In July, Zimride was bought by Enterprise Holdings, known mostly for its car rental companies. But according to a spokeswoman, Laura Bryant, they have "no plans to change anything."

That seems like a smart move to me — even more so now that I've spoken to several Zimride users I contacted at random through the site. They were all enthusiastic users who had saved money — though the site doesn't stand on its own, even for them; they had all found it necessary to find riders on Craigslist.

They were a diverse bunch. Fabio Vargas, 29, travels most weekends between his home in Tallahassee and Orlando, Fla., to visit his family and girlfriend and takes along fellow riders when he can; he charges $25 per passenger and calculated his annual savings at $1,300. Paul Orsett, a 50-year-old public-school teacher from outside Raleigh, N.C., has used ride-sharing to save on trips across the country. Julia Lipianskaya, 23, a recent college graduate from Palo Alto, Calif., used to scramble to find friends to share the driving and gas costs to visit her family in the Bay Area, until she found Zimride in her senior year and started occasionally even turning a profit on her trips.

All three took measures to reduce their risks, vetting potential riders online through Facebook and Google, and have occasionally rejected some. Mr. Orsett said passengers often vet him as well — like me, he's in the prime potential-creep age range. He points them to the Web site of a local news station that featured him as "teacher of the week."

Ms. Lipianskaya originally took only women passengers, but gradually loosened her policy, especially if she clicked over from Zimride to the potential passenger's Facebook profile and found mutual friends. "As a young woman traveling alone, it's a little nerve-racking sometimes," she said. "But I haven't had any bad experiences. I just always bring pepper spray. I hope I never have to use it."

If you think this all sounds like too much work and risk, consider trying a Canadian and European service when going abroad. It turns out that the United States is way behind other countries in long-distance ride-sharing. (We're doing better with intracity ride-sharing and taxilike services like Lyft, Uber and Sidecar.)

Just across the border in Canada, Kangaride.com appears to be booming. It has a slick interface and has about 5,000 rides posted per week (both Zimride and Craigslist declined to provide numbers), including some between Montreal and New York or Boston. The trade-off is that Kangaride charges a yearly membership fee of 7.50 Canadian dollars (about the same in American dollars), and charges passengers a 5 dollar fee per ride. But that money goes toward a staff of 25, which checks drivers' records under an agreement with several provincial governments, and monitors new members by following up with their passengers after trips.

The site functions for trips within the United States as well, but it is not yet widely used. "As of now we're focusing our marketing efforts on Canada," said Robin Grantner, Kangaride's communications coordinator. "But we would love to expand." Let's hope.

Travelers to Europe might also consider looking for rides online before they book expensive train tickets or plan to suffer the indignities of low-cost airlines. The German site carpooling.com has around 30 drivers offering rides between Berlin and Munich each weekend (averaging 30 euros, about $38 at $1.28 to the euro, a fraction of the train fare), and also works across Europe. In Britain, the big success story is Liftshare.com, which currently claims around 37,000 long-distance rides listed. "People join up because they're going to save half their travel costs or more," said Ali Clabburn, the site's founder. "But they come back again because they love the social side of it."

Mr. Clabburn added that one in 100 Britons has signed up, and that despite 100,000 people sharing cars every day, they have never had a reported safety incident.

As for my return trip from Fargo? I persuaded two old friends to fly out to meet me for the drive home, which relieved me of the driving responsibilities but not the gas costs. Next road trip, I'll post smarter and wider. Or just go to Canada.

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