Driving Forces

People don't carpool ("Anybody Want a Ride?" July 20) for the same reason they don't slow down: Humans are essentially self-centered beings. Being green takes a back seat to self-interest.
BRIAN C. DUFFEY
Scituate

Maybe it's related to the fact that you already spend most of your life with your co-workers. Not a negative necessarily, but add on a commute, and it could be.
LISA CLOUGH
Arlington

Often today's employers expect employees to come in earlier and stay later. Employees must be flexible to protect their jobs. Other car poolers are not going to wait around for someone to be finished with his or her workday.
Also, most folks do not want to accompany someone while he or she runs errands. The farther away from Boston a person lives, the more difficult it is to find someone with a similar destination and schedule.
Working from home is the best option; more employers need to accommodate this.
MERILLYN CHICKNAVORIAN
Fitchburg

The article afforded the moral high ground to those who forgo their personal vehicles. It also assumed the reader agrees with the very contentious man-made global warming theory - a theory, not scientific fact.
I agree on a couple of points, such as increase public transportation use, give better discounts to car poolers, and consider charging for entering the city during rush hour. But as a car enthusiast, I get the feeling that all of the Al Gore-inspired "useful idiots" want to enforce their agenda by law, not by choice. Let me contribute to the solution in my own ways instead of being forced into some crazy USSR solution.
J. ALLAN
North Billerica

At my previous job, I carpooled with someone for about three years. This was back when gas was south of $2 a gallon. We had a lot fun and discussed a variety of topics. Today, one of my coworkers lives about seven minutes away me, and I go right by another co-worker's house on the way to work. I have asked them both if they want to carpool. (It would not have to be every day.) No takers. I suspect they (and most of us) do not want the risk of hanging around while the other guy is still working. When car pooling was more popular, you could count on getting out at the same time each day, but not today.
MIKE GIULIANO
Stow

Author Alison Lobron writes, "unlike public transit, a car pool requires little in the way of costly taxpayer-funded infrastructure or maintenance." Roads, highways, and bridges used by automobiles count as costly taxpayer-funded infrastructure," and as the residents of Minneapolis know, they do indeed require maintenance. Carpooling is a good thing to do (I had a five-person car pool through most of graduate school), and there are advantages over transit, but one should not overlook the cost of our transportation infrastructure for automobiles.
PETER MAO
Pasadena, California

As a participant in a van pool to and from Londonderry, New Hampshire, and Boston, I wanted to note that the federal government is doing a lot help commuters. The government enables employers to underwrite the cost of their employees' transit or van-pool commutes to $115 per employee per month. This benefit is considered taxable income for the employee, and employers may write off these costs as a transportation expense. Alternatively, employers may allow employees to set aside pre-tax dollars to purchase transit passes, pay vanpool fares, and cover qualified parking costs.
BENJAMIN
Manchester, New Hampshire

PREDICTING SUICIDE
Peter Bebergal's article ("On the Edge," July 20) was tremendously moving and thought provoking. Thanks to the efforts of clinicians like Dr. Matthew Nock, one can only hope that in the future, patients like Eric Bebergal will be given the care they need in the face of such harrowing distress to overcome seemingly imminent self-harm.
DANIEL K. EISENBUD
New York

SOX FATIGUE
can appreciate the fact that Bostonians have no real identity outside of their connection with the Red Sox. It's bad enough that you can't go anywhere in the region without having to listen to or watch the game whenever it's on.
But as shocking as it may seem, there are lots of people here who couldn't care less about the Red Sox. So, please, enough is enough: No more cloying stories about supposedly precious children blurting out insipid things like "Go Sox" or "Youk!" Every week in "Tales From the City," you print at least one story about some child who says something cute about the Sox or some player. No more! There have to be other things going on in this city that have nothing to do with baseball.
RICHARD SMITH
Acton

SEEN ON THE WEB
From the blog PsychCentral:
... It's intriguing to imagine that our unconscious minds might give away our "true" thoughts when comes to something like suicide. It could become as valuable test as the ones we use to assess whether someone had a stroke and is at greater risk for a future stroke.

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