Admittedly, when the program now known as GWRideConnect began operating in 1974, the technology behind it wasn’t impressive.
Originally called RADCO Rideshare, it was started in response to the OPEC oil embargo, which drastically increased fuel prices and led to increased interest in alternatives to the single-occupancy vehicle. Commuters looking to carpool would call in and provide their work address, and then staff of the planning organization Rappahannock Area Development Commission would look for the address on a map divided into sections with numeric codes.
They would take the corresponding code and go to index-card files to find a matching number. From there, they would take out index cards that had carpool information for the area and type up a letter to be mailed to the worker.
It sounds like a slow process for something that’s done with databases today. But it was the beginning of a phenomenon that’s been putting commuters together and lessening traffic congestion and pollution for 50 years.
“Now it’s a touch of a button,” Leigh Anderson, GWRideConnect’s director, said this week at a celebration of the program at the office of the George Washington Regional Commission (that’s what RADCO is called now) in Fredericksburg.
Officially, GWRideConnect is the free commuter assistance program for the city and the counties of Stafford, Spotsylvania, Caroline, and King George, and it works with commuters, vanpool operators and transit agencies with a goal of reducing the number of single-driver cars on the area’s highways.
GWRideConnect partners with 60 vanpool companies operating 276 vanpools, and those partnerships reduced traffic by more than 14 million miles in fiscal year 2024.
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To learn more about ride-sharing options in the Fredericksburg area, visit GWRideConnect.
Some of those companies are just a group of people who split the cost of the van, and others are multi-van operations branching off to places such as Northern Virginia, Washington, Richmond, the Quantico Marine Corps base and the Naval base at Dahlgren.
“We do help people start vanpools and keep them going,” Anderson said.
One one-van group that called itself the “Van Rats” traveled to the National Science Foundation for almost 25 years, for example.
“And we don’t just do vanpooling,” Anderson said. “We will help people get into anything that’s not a single-occupancy vehicle.”
That may mean helping people figure out the Metrorail system or the routes of the Virginia Railway Express.
“They can call us, just give us their work location, and we will do the work for them on figuring out what would be the best,” Anderson said.
Sometimes people call looking for a vanpool, and GWRideConnect’s representatives will discover their work address is right next to a Metro station. Or, workers may initially say that they want to use Metro only to find out that a vanpool is more appropriate.
Anderson, who’s been doing her job since 2011, said the service’s mission is one she believes in. She can see how expensive it is to build roads.
“You can move so many people with a vanpool, bus or a train, and then you don’t have to build that extra lane,” she said.
And when people can use a ride-sharing option, that frees up roads for employees who have to drive to work, she said.
“So we work together,” Anderson said.
One of her proudest moments came about eight years ago when she convinced someone who moved here from Nebraska to try slugging, where single workers ride in another commuter’s car so they can all utilize interstate highway express lanes.
“They had never heard of it, and they were like, ‘What do you mean I get into a car with a stranger?’” Anderson said. “And I’m like, ‘No, no — you get into a car with two strangers!”
But, sure enough, the person called back about a month later and said, “I’m doing it!”
OmniRide also works with GWRideConnect, said the transit provider’s executive director, Robert A. Schneider.
If GWRideConnect has five or six commuters who want to go to the same location, that’s not enough for OmniRide to launch a new bus route, he said. But it may be enough for a carpool or vanpool.
“So GWRideConnect can bundle those people and put them together to make that trip,” Schneider said. “They have the same travel time, and that’s smart because it’s not enough for a bus, but it makes use of the toll lanes. So it’s the bang for the buck.”
Some of the vanpools that work with GWRideConnect are operated by Tony Sweeney, who runs Time 2 Go Vanpool. Sweeney, who lives in Chesterfield County, retired from the Army, where he used to do logistics.
“So instead of me keeping accountability of trucks and Humvees and all that, I just inventory vans now,” he said.
After his military career was over, Sweeney took a job that required him to commute from Chesterfield to Falls Church. He drove by himself for about two months, then someone suggested he try a vanpool.
He had never heard of such a thing. But once he started using it, it was only a matter of time before he was running his own vanpool.
“I sold my Mercedes, went to Enterprise and bought my first van,” Sweeney said.
That was in 2014. Then that first van led to another, and so on until he decided to get into the vanpool business full-time in 2020. Now his vans serve areas including Fredericksburg, Warrenton, Garrisonville, Stafford, Woodbridge, Dumfries and Falls Church.
Sweeney also has helped eight other vanpool operators get started — for free.
“I gave them a key guy, I gave them a maintenance guy, I gave them a logo guy,” he said. “So everything I had, I gave to them.”
Sweeney has sometimes had to deal with aggressive riders, and he said he’s had a van stolen, as well as tires, hubcaps and license plates swiped.
But, overall, he’s enjoyed his decade in the business.
Likewise, Anderson said she sometimes encounters people who are mad about traffic. But her clients are generally just pleasant, professional folk looking for their best way to get to work.
“It’s a great community,” she said. “It really is.”
