Doing the math
City Carshare sounds like a great idea. A fleet of cars individuals can borrow for the short-term, to facilitate not needing to own your own car. What a great idea. Just the sort of earthy-crunchy thing that's up my alley. So I hate to diss it. But I'm going to. Costs: $30 application fee, $300 deposit they sit on throughout your membership, $10/month, and to use the cars, $3.50/hour to a max of $35/day, plus $.37/mile (but they pay for gas.)
So joining up for a year is $450. Using a car 10 days in that year at an average of 30 miles/day is 10 * (35 + .37 * 30) = 461, for a total of $911 for the year.
A car can be rented as cheaply as $26/day. Even assuming 15 mpg and $2/gallon for gas, 30 miles/day adds $4. I'll guesstimate that on the outside tax and supplemental insurance adds another $15. Total cost for the usage above: $450.
It really isn't entirely clear to me what usage pattern would make City Carshare cost-effective. Maybe if you had to make a lot of really small trips. But I do great with my bike for lots of really small trips. I could sometimes use a car for the occasional trip to someplace too far or hard to get to by bike or mass transit, or to haul stuff too big or heavy or awkward for my bike trailer, and my call for that is rare enough for it to be straightforward to stack up a bunch of such errands to knock off in a single day.
I sort of like the idea of what they're doing politically, but I also wonder whether their model of participation costs dwarfing the incremental costs might inspire their membership to make more short trips in cars.
=v= But Zed, don't you realize, When you ride ALONE you ride with Hitler?
P.S.: There's another good car-sharing poster on the Princeton Critical Mass site. Apparently you can fit Hitler and three more despots in your 1940s-era car.
Posted by Jym on September 10 2002 14:03
there does seem to be a cheaper alternative out there... my roommate has signed up with this service:
flexcar
Posted by mr. me on September 10 2002 15:33
=v= Hmm, Flexcar doesn't seem to be operating in our area except as a continuation of a station car program. I once participated in a different station car program, located in Berkeley, but that was subsidized and even went after revenue by printing ads on the sides of the cars. (Follow the link and you'll see the little electric car I drove, with the logo of my former employers printed on the window. I'll bet that sold a lot of enterprise database systems to the residents of west Berkeley.
As you can probably gather from the site, the program fell on hard times, and has brought in a car-rental company for help.
Posted by Jym on September 16 2002 15:51