Against the backdrop of a terrible environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, everybody's frustrated.

Gulf coast residents are seething at BP. BP shareholders are upset at the prospect of losing billions on their investment. The federal government has lost patience with the progress being made after almost 60 days of dashed hopes (will there be a government takeover of the disaster response when the President speaks tonight at 8:00pm?). And many commuters - including some here in Georgia - are contemplating where they want to fill up their gas tanks, an expression of the public ire directed at (and potential dollars diverted from) British Petroleum.

But something interesting is happening. For some, the anger they feel about the seemingly hopeless situation we're in is starting to morph into something else. Bubbling up from the depths are diverging emotions about the oil spill as it relates to driving:

Some feel guilty about their reliance on cars. From today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution, reader Sybil Thomas of Whitesburg writes:

"I can bemoan a response that cannot encompass the enormity of the environmwental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. But as long as I am still filling up my gas tank with oil-based fuel, I, too, am responsible."

Others feel defensive about their freedom to drive, regardless of the environmental risks. Whichever direction your emotions are channeled, there is a desire for action. And MARTA's annual "Dump the Pump" event is one way to do something with your feelings about the situation. This Thursday, June 17, MARTA is encouraging all Atlantans to take transit to work. Another way to turn your feelings about oil into something actionable is to find a carpool partner and ride to work together once or twice a week. There are resources available from The Clean Air Campaign and RideSmart to make it easy.

Borne out of the Deepwater Horizon disaster is at least one positive circumstance. The oil spill is getting more conversations started about transportation options and about accountability. Where do you stand on these issues?

Clayton County’s bus service, C-TRAN, is scheduled to end March 31. This is a major hit to riders who rely on this service for their commute to work. Luckily, there are other options. The Clean Air Campaign wants to help make the transition to a new commute as seamless as possible for displaced C-TRAN commuters.

If you currently ride C-TRAN to work, there are some other commute options in your area that are worth investigating, such as riding an Xpress bus or joining or starting a vanpool or carpool. RideSmart can help match you with other commuters who live and work near you. If you want to carpool with someone who lives near you but works in a different area, you could try carpooling to the nearest MARTA station.

To learn more about your options and find out ways you may be able to offset the cost of your new commute, contact us by calling 1-877-CLEANAIR or e-mailing Daniel Jessee at DJessee@CleanAirCampaign.org. We’re here to help.

This is your chance to cash it in and get a new, more fuel efficient car. You can get that hybrid you’ve been eyeing but didn’t have enough money to buy before. The Clean Air Campaign hopes that more Georgia commuters who take advantage of this program will go a step beyond just driving a cleaner car ... and actually fill it with carpool partners headed in the same direction. In the metro Atlanta area, just 6% of all commute trips in an average week are carpools. Plenty of room to grow that number, and there are resources galore to help you find others to share the ride. Think about it: you and your carpool partner could pay less for gas and your commute wouldn’t make as much of an impact on the environment.

The Daily Green

But if you’re going to ditch the clunker, you need to act fast! The Cash for Clunkers program that is currently giving car buyers rebates of up to $4,500 for trading in their old gas guzzlers will end Monday at 8pm.

People throughout the country have been jumping at the opportunity to take part in the Cash for Clunkers program. It instantly became popular, with people burning through the initial $1 billion of funding within the first week. As of Thursday, auto dealers had recorded more than 457,000 dealer transactions, which put $1.9 billion in the pockets of car buyers across the country.

If you don’t have a clunker but still could use a more fuel efficient car, register for The Clean Air Campaign, Q100, and Rock 100.5s Green Machine Giveaway contest. All you have to do is pledge to make your commute cleaner by carpooling at least once a week, and you have a chance of winning a 2010 Honda Insight Hybrid. I bet driving alone doesn’t offer you rewards like this.

Between job demands, commitments and traffic congestion, there simply aren't enough hours in the day anymore. So it's obvious more people feel compelled to multi-task in this go-go world, which begs this question: if we attempt several tasks at once, will any of them get done effectively?

I'll narrow it down to the things we try to do when we're behind the wheel, slogging through traffic congestion to and from work. In metro Atlanta, 84% of us make this trip alone each workday and it takes us an average of 36 minutes each way ... plenty of time to become tempted to:

Change radio stations, talk on our cell phones, text message or scroll through e-mails on our mobile devices, rummage through articles
piled on the passenger seat, soothe cranky children in the back seat who ask, "are we there yet?," reach for our coffee, scan the newspaper headlines, shave, eat, or get dressed.

All while driving. Did I miss anything? What's the strangest thing you've seen another commuter doing while behind the wheel?

The more "productive" we try to be while driving, the higher the risk that we're going to hurt ourselves or others. The AAA Foundation released a national study on the culture of traffic safety in 2008 that describes how many of us do some of these activities from behind the wheel. 53% of respondents indicated they talk on a cell phone while driving. 14% of respondents indicated they text while driving. And a study by Exxon is purported to have found that as many as 70% of us eat while driving.

Yikes. Here are the compelling reasons why more commuters need to look into alternatives to driving alone:

1. According to the Governor's Office of Highway Safety, the majority of two-vehicle collisions in Georgia (46%) are rear-enders.
2. Stack this finding next to the latest trend data from the Urban Mobility Report, a study we reference often with respect to traffic congestion, and you'll see that 53% of traffic congestion (delay) in Atlanta is linked to road incidents.
3. It should come as little surprise, then, that a recent survey by an auto insurance carrier found Atlanta commuters are 26% more likely to get into an accident than the national average.

With more demands being placed on workers to do more work and more challenges to juggle work and personal tasks, sharing the ride just makes sense. More carpool, vanpool, rail and bus riders are stepping forward with their stories about finding ways to be productive as passengers. Certainly it's safer for everyone when "productivity" is attempted only from the passenger seat.

A new marketing survey finds commuters in "The City Too Busy to Hate" have ample time to project anger towards each other as they jockey for position on the region's congested roadways.

Don't drive angry.

Atlanta, the genteel metropolis where people say "hey" and open the door for one other, checks in at #4 on the list of cities with the least courteous drivers, behind New York, Dallas and Detroit. Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, Portland, Oregon, topped the rankings as the most courteous city for motorists.

The worst part is that Atlanta moved up on the list, from 6th in 2008. Guess lots of the 84% of commuters in the region who drive alone each day need to smooth out some anger issues.

How did we go from bad to worse? A few thoughts:

1. Population growth has brought a million new residents to metro Atlanta in the past decade, and the region expects to add another two million people by 2030. We're fighting for our "personal space" on a crowded transportation network that projects to grow even more crowded. And we're not happy about it.

2. We're not paying attention to what we're doing because we're preoccupied with multi-tasking, talking on the phone or texting. Of the 24 cities participating in the survey, Atlanta was the city most likely to see other commuters slam on their brakes at the last minute.

3. We're short on patience because we're always running late due to delay from traffic (which burns up 60 hours a year for the average metro ATL commuter). This shows up in the finding that Atlanta is second-most likely to see other commuters run through red lights on a daily basis or change lanes without warning.

What can we do to suppress some of the asphalt angst we fling at our fellow commuters?

Here's an idea: next time you're behind the wheel and that vein pops out of your neck because the dummy in front of you just swerved into your lane and cut you off, share a laugh about it with your carpool partner. Or, tuck away that middle finger and thank your lucky stars you don't have to do battle in traffic the next day because you're working a compressed workweek. Or, ease up on the horn and make a mental note to ask your employer about getting a discounted transit pass.

Maybe these are the things the happy commuters do in Portland.

In metro Atlanta, 84% of commuters drive alone to and from work on a maxed out road network. We’re chided as the most expensive city for commuters in the entire nation as we stew in traffic for an average of 72 minutes a day roundtrip. There’s no question we need more infrastructure, transit, sustainable funding sources and focused leadership to meet the mobility needs of a growing region. But even with new funding, it will take a decade or more to bring new projects out of the ground. What we need NOW is to make the best use of the existing options we have.

That got us thinking, “what if we could show the impact that taking cars off the road can have on traffic?” We know that on bank holidays, it’s much easier to get to work, despite the fact that only a small percentage of cars are not on the roads. If more commuters chose not to drive alone, what could that do to traffic congestion? The Clean Air Campaign and our partners came up with a neat way to express that idea visually.

We created a series of simulated traffic photos. Check them out here. Here’s how we did it: Last fall, a photographer scaled a fence on the 10th Street overpass straddling the Downtown Connector during morning rush hour to shoot a picture of typical Atlanta traffic (she nearly got arrested trying to get the perfect shot). A week later, our staff and partners met in an empty parking lot in Buckhead and set up a bunch of folding chairs:

We arranged them on the blacktop in configurations that accurately portray the number of seats in a typical carpool, vanpool and commuter bus. We sat in the chairs and modeled for the camera as the photographer snapped photos from atop a scissor lift. Then, the images were painstakingly cleaned up in PhotoShop and merged into the original traffic photo of the Downtown Connector.

The concept has become a mainstay in The Clean Air Campaign’s presentations to employers and commuters. In just a few images, we can explain what we’re trying to accomplish. The best part is that many of our colleagues and partners sat in those chairs and helped make the project possible. How much longer until the concept of these photos becomes more of a reality? That’s up to you.

Back to school and back to the carpool line. Every year parents wait anxiously in the car to greet their students after the first day back. It’s very tempting to wait with the air conditioning running, especially since we’ve all heard the myth that idling uses less fuel than restarting your car. Actually, idling for 30 seconds wastes more gas than restarting your engine.

And every minute spent idling releases 6.6 pounds of pollution into the air around your child’s school. Pollution from vehicle emissions is especially harmful to children, who are lower to the ground near vehicle tailpipes and breathe on average 50 percent more per pound of body weight than adults. This means their young lungs could be breathing in twice as much pollution.

Not a healthy thought.

Through the Clean Air Schools program, The Clean Air Campaign offers solutions to unhealthy air on school grounds. No idling campaigns, walking school buses and bus ridership empower students to do their part to make the air cleaner and healthier.

Do the programs really work? During the 2007- 2008 school year, 10 Gwinnett County Public Schools participated in a no-idle pilot program and reduced idling on schools grounds by 69 percent, more than double their goal. And thanks to a grant from The UPS Foundation, The Clean Air Campaign will be able to take no idling campaigns to almost 125 schools this coming school year.

Through our longstanding partnership with Mothers & Others for Clean Air, The Clean Air Campaign is supporting greater awareness among school administrators of the health risks that children face when they participate in outdoor physical activities on Smog Alert days.

Do you know if your school system employs no-idling measures? Are students encouraged to form walking school buses or carpool? Let us know how your school keeps the air healthy or blog about getting involved with Clean Air Schools.

“Meta-what?” you’re probably asking. That’s the battle cry being heard around the state from devoted “Good Morning America” viewers and all of us here at The Clean Air Campaign. We’ve been rooting for our Bronze Level Partner Metametrix, Inc. as five of its employees competed in the morning show’s first ever Carpool Challenge.

Duluth-based Metametrix was one of eight carpooling teams from around the country that competed to lower their commute costs and save the environment. They did it by ditching their solo commute and sharing the ride with co-workers headed in the same direction.

You can track Metametrix’s success here, where they logged their commute and blogged about it all week long.

And if you’re inspired by what your fellow Georgians have been doing in the national media spotlight, why not give carpooling a try yourself? Just a few weeks ago Michael, Kris, Bryant, Eve and Augustin were driving to work alone too, but after reading their blogs, it seems they love their new commute and the instantaneous benefits that come with sharing the ride. RideSmart will even match you with a potential carpool. So give it a try, then come back and leave a message on our blog about your experience.