Sites for Event Carpooling

http://carpoolworld.com
This site is for commuters, free and seemingly easy to use. They have an events carpool list as well, but currently there are only two events listed. You enter your info and then "matches" pop up, and it looks like they have a lot for the Bay Area. We'd love to hear if someone has compared this to 511.org.

Facebook relies on your facebook community. It might be useful for a student with lots of friends at the same campus, or in similar circumstances. Probably more useful as a social-carpooling tool: find a friend to a go to a festival with, and then decide which weekend and which festival. Without a big facebook community I can't even test it.

Craigslist is amazing for its community, though the search for rideshares uses bulletin-board style instead of a proper sort. Both early testers have found their best results for city-to-city carpooling on Craigslist; it seems especially useful up and down I5 on the West Coast. Plus Craig is our hero. It's also useful as a backup site for commutes and events if your city or event hasn't organized anything better. You have to be a bit persistent to maximize searches: try all likely spellings both when creating a post or searching, consider nearby towns or county names (to go to Arcata, also search Eureka, Humboldt, and Humbolt), and for one-way trips consider searching the Craigslist site for both your departure and arrival towns.

SpaceShare builds customized ridesharing sites for large events, often with other travel-sharing: coordinating room, flight and taxi connections. Of all the event carpool sites, they tend to cost the most and do the most hand-holding, customization and outreach assistance; often they have a community-building focus beyond travel sharing. SpaceShare focuses on conferences and festivals, with a mix of professional, music and activist events. SpaceShare is prototyping carpool systems for repeating "events." All their events are free for the carpooler to use: find upcoming public events here. They're also capable of building church, school or business systems, again integrated with forums or other community-building beyond plain carpooling.