If your town is anything like mine, there are lots of cars on the road after school as kids are heading to and from ballparks, soccer fields, music lessons…you know the list goes on. There is surprisingly little carpooling because, I’ve figured out, it takes a lot of organization to pull a carpool together and rushed parents often feel it’s easier to jump in the car and get our own kids to where they need to go.

But as gas prices keep rising to staggering new heights, carpools are sure to get more play, right? If parents knew there are some terrific online tools that make organizing carpools easier than employing a string of phone calls or and endless loop of emails, carpools surely would catch on.

Divide The Ride is a web site devoted solely to carpools. You can easily create a group of people you know, include email addresses and cell phone numbers, and once everyone enters their drive-time availability, the web site will compile a schedule of who is driving when and send email and text-message alerts to all of the members. The group members’ personal information is accessible only by the group. If there’s a conflict and you suddenly can’t drive during your allotted time, there’s a “conflict resolution” feature, which will alert the next person on the list until another driver is secured. If no one can drive, messages go out to tell everyone the carpool won’t work for that leg of the trip and everyone is on their own.

Some more nice features: You can track the number of miles saved, how many rides the group has shared and how many gallons of gas was spared. Better for the environment, the wallet, and, yes, the sanity.

CircleUp is another free web-based service that allows you set up carpools as well as organize just about any group activity. Again, what’s great about this is it cuts out the inbox full of emails from everyone in a group. A carpool organizer (yes there still has to be one, but the amount of time spent on organizing will be reduced), can send out one email polling group members about available times to drive, then get one email back with all of the responses. Divide The Ride goes a step further to create the carpooling schedule, but CircleUp helps get the organizing job done well, too.

If you’re a grown-up looking to share a ride with other grown-ups to work and other locales, then ERideShare.com is worth a look. Right now, you’ll find nearly 15,000 commuter rides, 5,000 cross-country trips, and 125 car-sharing and errands listings.

If anyone has tried these ride-share organizing sites, please share. And if you're using the web to organize much-needed carpools another way, let us in on it. Isn't it time carpooling became standard operating procedure?