Car pooling, car share service, ride sharing or hitching a ride with a friend. No matter how you say it, its the same concept. The ability to share rides to a common destination with others that are headed in the same direction. Most of us don’t think about car pooling having a history but like everything in the world there is a brief history behind car pooling and car sharing.

The idea of catching a ride to a common destination can be traced as far back as the early settlers and travelers. As long as there was traveling going on, people were car pooling. There wasn’t a lot of public transportation between villages back then and it could take weeks or months before a public carriage would arrive. This prompted people to go in search of people who would ride in the same direction as them.

When cars were first invented, people started to stray from this type of thinking. Everyone wanted to own and ride in their own personal car. It wasn’t until the 1970s that the idea of having a car pool started to gain momentum again. During the 1970s people were seeing a gas shortage and in an effort to conserve and save on gas they developed car pools to work and various activities.

Car pooling started to decrease during in the 1980s and 1990s, but it started to pick up momentum in the new millennium. The combination of the ease of communication via the Internet and the new fear of global warming increasing because of the number of cars on the road, has caused a number of people to bring car pooling back in style.

While it might seem like a brief history, car pooling has just started to take off again. With the addiction of car pooling incentives and easier forms of communication, there will soon be a lot more to add to the history of car pooling.