Requests
- Posted by ryan on June 11th, 2008 filed in Economics, Environment
Will car-sharing services, like Zipcar, survive?
Yes.
There’s no denying that automobiles are a very convenient way to get around, especially when you’re carrying a lot of stuff. The problem is that when everyone uses one and we structure our lives around them, everything goes to the dogs. But demand for occasional-use vehicles is going to grow. And things like Zipcar probably positively influence dense living and transit ridership, because they make it easier to live a carless life. Ditto for cabs; they’re largely plain old dirty cars, but because they make it easier for households to ditch personal vehicles, they surely have a net green effect.
The other advantage for car-sharing services is that it’s cheaper and easier to upgrade shared fleets to hybrid or electric models. Greens note how important it will be to turn over the nation’s automobile fleet to cleaner models, but the number of cars out there is enormous and new cars are incredibly expensive. If we can shift a substantial percentage of drivers from personal automobiles to shared ones, we can cut the expense of greening the nation’s auto fleet drastically.
June 11th, 2008 at 11:48 am
Would it make sense for the shared cars to be plug-in hybrids when that technology is more widespread? It seems like having that option would save the car sharing company some money, since electric drive is about 1.5-3 cents per mile (200-300 Wh per mile at 6-10 cents per kWh) compared to gasoline at 10-20 cents per mile ($4.00 per gallon for 40 MPG - 20 MPG). Plug-in helps when the trips are short (<15 miles) and relatively slow (8 hours).
June 11th, 2008 at 11:48 am
Meant to say slow (8 hours). Oops.
June 11th, 2008 at 11:49 am
Well, it’s still messed up.
June 11th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
Thoughts on jitneys? They can also get cars off the road and help people live the carless life.
They work someplaces. Would they work here?
June 11th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Jitneys - or, at least, 15-person commuter vans from East Overshoe, West Virginia, will be the salvation of folks who have bought out there and find themselves facing 100-mile commutes to DC. This is a good thing, I think, despite Ryan’s notion that it should all go back to forest, since we would face enormous costs to replace that edge-of-the-known-universe housing stock. The ideal, I think, would be to have a way to discourage the building of any more of this exurban housing stock, but to use what’s there.
Zipcar has trucks, and it is tempting me to get rid of my 1991 F150, which mostly sits while I use our higher-mileage Honda but is really useful sometimes.
June 11th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Michael, while, mathematically, plug-in hybrids would be an ideal technology for car-sharing services, there is the unfortunate logistical issue of where, exactly, to plug them in. Most ZipCars are parked on the street, out in the open, where it may not be feasible to install an electrical outlet.
dave.s., if you’re curious about whether to sell that truck of yours, consider this math: add up all of the expenses you pay for your truck in a year (gas, insurance, maintenance, etc) and divide that number by the total number of hours that you absolutely have to use that truck. If the result is less than about $10/hour you should absolutely dump your Ford. On top of that you can factor in the money that you would get from the sale of the truck however you’d like.
June 11th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
I should add: I realize that jitneys are typically pushed by the libertarian crowd. That’s not a reason to reject them out of hand, of course. They seem to fill a useful niche between taxis and buses/mass transit, but I don’t know enough about them to understand the cons.