Mass. hitchhikers plan to get on the road

''Hitchhiking isn't as common as it was then," Crowe said. ''But with the price of oil going up, people might want to think about changing their habits."

Carpooling and ride-sharing certainly aren't new ideas. But Crowe's group -- which calls itself Communi-GO -- is trying to offer a more flexible transit system to college students, poor people, and anyone else who may not have a car or the desire to drive themselves throughout the Pioneer Valley, the stretch of Western Massachusetts that follows Interstate 91 between the Connecticut and Vermont borders.

''It makes sense that people are looking to hitchhike as a new way of carpooling," said Morgan Strube, a longtime hitchhiker who maintains www.digihitch.com, a hitchhiking information website. ''It's informal, and it could be pretty fun."

Strube traces the roots of hitchhiking to the turn of the last century, when he said people looking for adventure ''realized there are cars out there that will stop and give me a ride." By the 1920s, hitchhikers were mostly young job-seekers looking for cheap and easy ways to commute from rural areas into large cities, he said.

That's the basic premise behind Communi-GO. The group's idea sprang from a discussion of ''peak oil," a concept that the world's oil supply is shrinking at a rate that will never be able to satisfy growing energy demands.

''We're trying to take some concrete steps to address the problems of peak oil," said Molly Hale, one of the Communi-GO organizers.

Similar efforts have been made in the San Francisco and Washington, D.C., areas where impromptu carpooling systems have been set up along highways and heavily traveled roads.

The Pioneer Valley program is still in planning stages, and the group needs to answer questions about safety, liability, and how to screen potential drivers and riders. They figure 300 people will have to sign up before Communi-GO can, well, get up and go.