An acquaintance of mine recently drove a group of his friends to a convention a couple of states away, probably 1,000 miles round-trip, under the typical 'I drive, you pay for gas' arrangement. It wasn't my place to explain to him that he'd been ripped off by his friends, big time.

Run the numbers. The vehicle they took got around 25 mpg, which means that the trip burned 40 gallons of amber gold. At $4 a gallon, the three passengers split a $160 gas bill, which figured out to $53 and change each. Edumund.com's handy "True Cost To Own" calculator for the Honda CR-V they drove shows that, based on 15,000 miles a year, over five years the cost per mile to operate this vehicle is $.52. This includes depreciation, insurance and maintenance, in addition to fuel.

At that estimate, the trip cost my friend $520. Minus the $160 in gas, he was out of pocket for $360, all for the privilege of chauffeuring his friends.

How can you deal with this situation? The easy way, or the hard way.

With average gas prices peaking over $4, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that you can save money by carpooling. Even though the savings associated with carpooling is clear to me and my carpool partner some people may not realize exactly how much you can save by carpooling.

Thankfully RideSearch.com provides a great calculator to figure out just how much it costs you to schlep to and from work each month. The calculator even takes the maintenance costs of your vehicle into the final cost calculation. The calculator is only one tool they provide, the main draw is that you can use RideSearch.com to find other people to carpool with.

The service helps connect you with carpoolers in the area and takes into account a myriad of preferences for sorting and finding carpool partners. For example you can set your preferences to indicate you only want to share rides with females who don't smoke, have working air conditioning and will alternate days of driving. Of course the more restrictions you start adding in to the mix the fewer applicants will be remaining.