On Car Sharing

Posted by on . 18 comments.

I’m sure that in a very transit-oriented city like New York, car-sharing does generate some mode shifting from walking or biking or taking the train to driving, though I would guess that even in New York, the net effect of the service is less driving (in no small part because non-drivers are sure to find driving and parking in the city to be an extremely stressful and unpleasant experience). In cities where a carless lifestyle is somewhat more marginal (like Washington) the existence of a zipcar service is a huge comfort to those thinking about giving up their automobiles.

And I don’t think there is anything wrong with acknowledging the fact that for some things, the availability of an automobile is hugely advantageous. Carrying around big or bulky loads on foot is hard and unpleasant. The ability to use a car for, say, a trip to the hardware store or to the market in preparation for a big dinner party significantly increases the convenience of city life.

And that’s just as important as the effect of car-sharing on individual trips. Zipcar may mean that some trips which were previously taken on foot or by transit are now taken by automobile. But because using an automobile to ferry around huge items is so much more convenient than trying to do it on foot, the availability of car-sharing makes city life more attractive relative to the suburban alternative. And this should encourage more people to live in cities, which will indisputably be green, on net.

Now there may be other ways to arrive at the same level of convenience that don’t include driving (and given the fact that not everyone can drive, it may be worth exploring things like home delivery of purchased items and micro-mover services). But in general, I think car-sharing services are likely to be a clear positive for basically any city.

Comments

  1. Christopher says:
    November 11, 2009 at 11:05 am

    We have car sharing in NYC, but it’s expensive. And I still haven’t figured out a reason to do it. I have 3 hardware stores within walking distance of my apartment in East Harlem. (And soon a Home Depot.) Similar with grocery stores, laundromats, and restaurants. The only thing I can say it might be helpful for is longer trips to the beach, shore, or friends in New Jersey.

    Even Trader Joe’s in Manhattan offers delivery service. Although I’ve never used it; the store is more an impulse decision than a destination. If you think the West End store is a zoo. You’ve never been in the Union Square store. Where the line wraps three-quarters of the way through the store — at all times. Plus, I like Trader Joe’s but it’s 100 blocks south and seems like a real trek for something that’s not much better than what I have close by.

    So in a word, I’ve been become your typical hyper-localized city dweller again. (My time in SF was the same way; I have a friend out there who has live there for over 10 years, and just made his first trip to Oakland. Imagine someone living in DC who had never been to Virginia or Maryland. Doesn’t feel so likely.)

    Not that car-sharing isn’t a good thing, I think it has a place especially if it were better promoted in places like the Bronx, or Queens. Or even parts of Brooklyn. But the density of NY is such that entire mini-worlds are within several blocks of most locations. And everything can be delivered.

  2. paul says:
    November 11, 2009 at 11:08 am

    If you consider that the usual way to ferry big stuff around in a city is either a taxi or a rented van, car sharing is probably going to reduce total automobile miles.

  3. Doug says:
    November 11, 2009 at 11:22 am

    It’s bound to be pretty rare that an errand which could be handily accomplished on foot would be tempting to use a zip car for. At least until they offer home delivery of the car.

  4. Brian Weatherson says:
    November 11, 2009 at 11:49 am

    But ZipCar does offer something close to home delivery of the car, at least for some people. My building’s garage just added three ZipCars, and many of the buildings around me have larger ZipCar holdings. It’s still too expensive to really replace walking errands, but the home delivery problem has (in many cases in NYC) been addressed.

  5. jayackroyd says:
    November 11, 2009 at 11:53 am

    Christopher

    I have folks I visit in NJ. While NJ Transit can get me there, it is quite time consuming when compared to walking a block to one of the zipcar garages and driving.

    And, Doug, that same density makes it possible to locate zipcar locations quite close to customers.

  6. Doug says:
    November 11, 2009 at 1:44 pm

    Really, Brian? That’s kind of amazing to me. I’m missing a lot by not living more urban.

  7. BeyondDC says:
    November 12, 2009 at 10:55 am

    Cars are wonderfully useful tools. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with using them. Where we went wrong was in turning our cities so completely over to cars that they became a trap rather than a tool.

    So sure, maybe the availability of ZipCar causes some people who rarely drive to do so slightly more often, but that’s not inherently a bad thing.

    It’s not that cars are bad. It’s that overuse of cars is bad.

  8. TW Andrews says:
    November 12, 2009 at 11:16 am

    I live in downtown Boston, and the availability of Zipcar means that I don’t need to own a car.

    It’s relatively inconvenient to try and do grocery shopping on foot or via taxi, and most trips outside of Boston/Cambridge require a car. While I can take public transportation to work, easy access to a car is important enough that I would own a car were Zipcars not available and cheap (relative to owning and driving a car).

    I should also point out that this is strictly an economic decision for me. I could absolutely not care less about my carbon footprint or how green my lifestyle is, but because it’s easier and cheaper to live downtown, take public transportation and use Zipcar whenever I need to drive, I have a fairly low impact lifestyle.

    From the environmentalists point of view, this ought to be the biggest advantage of services like Zipcar. It enables people who don’t care to be green.

  9. Cynic says:
    November 12, 2009 at 11:20 am

    I suspect the trade-offs are less substantial than you imagine; I know any number of city dwellers who dispensed with the hassle of keeping a car once ZipCar became available. They still live in the same place, but on balance, ZipCar has reduced their automotive miles, because it forces them to pay the price of travel by automobile up-front. They only take the ZipCar when it’s worth it, whereas when they owned the car anyway, the overall costs of transportation were much higher, but the marginal costs of driving to a store vanishingly small and largely disguised.

    Be that as it may, ZipCar is just beginning to realize perhaps its greatest promise – revolutionizing vehicle fleets. There are some 4 million vehicles in federal, state, and local fleets. ZipCar is now commercializing its ride-sharing technology to enable governments to reduce the size of their automotive fleets. Even a 1% reduction in the size of those fleets would take 40,000 cars off the road – building fewer cars has environmental benefits that dwarf the effects of, say, fuel efficiency. And the benefits might be far more substantial than that.

    I don’t know whether it will catch on – bureaucracies can be hard to change. But there are some ways in which the potential for FastFleet far outstrips the potential of ZipCar’s consumer offerings.

  10. rbt says:
    November 12, 2009 at 11:20 am

    this post rests on a bizarre and clearly misguided premise. in the dozens of times i’ve taken a zipcar, there’s never been a single instance where I would have accomplished the task on foot. Rather, I would have just made alternate plans for a car. and it’s hard to believe anybody would go to the trouble to get a zipcar for something that remotely be accomplished on foot. there are many interesting angles to the zipcar, but if you believe the utility of the zipcar is replacing foot traffic, you need to learn a bit more about the subject before posting.

  11. cb says:
    November 12, 2009 at 11:49 am

    I have been a zipcar user since its inception in NYC and think it better to call the service what it is, short term car rental, rather than “car sharing.” Car sharing implies that we are sharing the car amongst a group of people, when in fact we are renting it for an hour or so from a company.

  12. Jane says:
    November 12, 2009 at 11:53 am

    An additional perspective: when retired, my husband and I will no longer need two cars and will not be able to afford them. Signing up with Zipcar (or its nonprofit equivalent here in Chicago, called IGo) will enable us both to freelance because we won’t worry that one will have to forego a job if the other is using the one car that we will continue to own.

  13. Joel says:
    November 12, 2009 at 2:18 pm

    This seems to overlook the consideration that maybe 30% of the lifetime carbon footprint of a car is associated with its manufacture.

    For every person that chooses to do their necessary driving in a zipcar instead of buying their own car, it would seem to automatically reduce the net carbon impact by the equivalent of several years of driving since no additional car would have to be manufactured.

    Most people using zipcar probably wouldn’t buy a car if it wasn’t an option, but I’m it seems reasonable to assume many would.

  14. Dan McGuire says:
    November 12, 2009 at 8:23 pm

    My parents and brother live on Martha’s Vineyard. It bewilders me why zipcar hasn’t set up a station in Woods Hole to take advantage of the hundreds of MV residents who pay $75 to bring their car over and shop on the mainland for a few hours. The Island would also be a great stop for a zipcar station. Is Zipcar growing? Why is it avoiding easy money?

  15. rjs says:
    November 14, 2009 at 7:03 am

    strange discussion; living five miles from the nearest store, and with few other houses on the way, a one person car is the only way i can do anything…

  16. low-tech cyclist says:
    November 16, 2009 at 10:30 am

    Hell, even out here in the exurbs, I would love having Zipcars available.

    My wife and I don’t really need two cars; we need more like 1.1 cars. But we’re forced to own two cars due to our very occasional need to drive in different directions at the same time, and there’s no other convenient way to get a second car out here other than to own it.

    If we had Zipcars in the neighborhood, we’d only have to own one car. And I’d be delighted with that.

  17. jim says:
    November 17, 2009 at 9:58 am

    Paradoxically, it needs a very dense walkable urban neighbourhood to support car-sharing. To position a shared car, you need enough potential riders within its walkshed (people walk to shared cars, they don’t drive!) to ensure that it will be used enough to cover its costs. But it’s worse than that. You need to position enough other cars near that car so that potential riders are reassured by the redundancy that there will be a car available to them when they want one. And those cars need enough potential riders within their overlapping walksheds to ensure enough use to cover their costs.

    Look at the distribution of Zipcars, how it drops off drastically with decreasing density.

  18. low-tech cyclist says:
    November 18, 2009 at 5:32 pm

    jim – can’t say I’m surprised by any of that.

    Don’t know if you were responding to me in some part, but my desire for Zipcars in my exurban neighborhood was strictly wishful thinking, not something I’d expect ZipCar to actually be able to make a buck off of.

    What I can hope for is that as more and more people use Zipcars in the cities, their increasing popularity gradually makes them economically viable in decreasingly dense areas. It would still be a hell of a long time before they became viable in my exurb, though.