Carpooling is a simple way to make a big sustainable impact at the Lab. By sharing a ride with others, you can reduce your carbon footprint, save money, help ease traffic, and enjoy convenient, dedicated parking spaces onsite. And getting a carpool permit is now easier than ever.
Based on the community’s feedback, the Lab streamlined its process for obtaining a carpool parking permit at the gates. Here’s how.
- Pull up to the gate in the badge holders lane, badge in with your passenger, and let site security know you need a carpool permit for the day.
- Site security will verify your badges, ensure at least one person has general hours parking access, and log the permit remotely with the Site Operations Center.
- Receive your physical carpool permit from site security and drive to a designated carpool space available at numerous parking areas on the Lab’s hillsite. Make sure to display your permit.
Designated carpool spaces are reserved until 10 a.m. Monday through Friday for vehicles with two or more occupants. Vehicles must display a valid Carpool Temporary parking permit issued at a Lab gate.
The Benefits of Carpooling
Carpooling offers multiple benefits over commuting alone. Here are just a few:
- Use premium parking: The Lab provides 35 parking spaces dedicated to carpoolers that are conveniently located at the Lab’s most populous buildings.
- Save money: By sharing expenses with other commuters, carpooling saves money on gas, car wear & tear, and parking fees. Try 511.org’s carpool calculator to measure the money and emissions you could save by carpooling.
- Reduce traffic congestion: Carpooling reduces the number of cars on the road, and the more people who make that choice, the less traffic congestion there will be.
- Help protect the environment: Fewer cars on the road also means less air pollution, including carbon emissions.
- Reduce stress: Sharing driving responsibilities with other commuters gives you a chance to sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride.
- Meet new people: Carpooling is a great way to make new friends and start new professional relationships.
Scoop Commute is the Lab’s dedicated carpooling partner and offers a convenient and affordable way to connect with carpool partners within the Lab community. With over 1,400 Lab users, the app matches participants with fellow colleagues going the same way.
For more information on carpooling, visit commute.lbl.gov/service/carpool-vanpool/.
And remember, getting a carpool permit at the gate is easy: just badge in with your passenger, ask for a permit, and go!
2 Comments
1. Carpool parking. The current system is neither easy nor convenient, not to mention painfully slow. Writing a paper slip in the 21st century – give me a break.
While the old system – 2 parking stickers on a mirror – was actually easy, convenient, and fast.
2. Scoop. We’re using it, it’s OK – simplifies our rider/driver counting compared to the Excel doc. The main problem is that it is not doing any reasonable matching by address along the route; we actually had to fake addresses for it to work for us (a group of 3). On the Scoop reps’ advice, when they were on-site. So, if you are already carpooling, Scoop will work with some effort, but you can’t find a matching ride on Scoop.
Hi Alexander,
Thank you for your feedback. The Lab expanded its carpooling privileges a few years ago to redefine carpooling as at least one person with regular-hours parking privileges and at least two people with active Lab badges. This allows affiliates who are not eligible for regular-hours parking to carpool, whereas the previous system of requiring two parking permits excluded them. Since we revised the process a few months ago, the average transaction time has been less than one minute.
Thank you also for the Scoop feedback. We will pass this along to the Scoop team as a suggestion for their service.
For further questions or comments, please reach out to Commute at commute@lbl.gov.