We used to have two cars, and with very busy schedules and a young child, sometimes we miss the convenience. So, I thought I would look into car sharing as a possible alternative to buying another one.
Car-sharing is an interesting idea that started in Europe in the 1980s and spread to North America via Quebec City. When a group of people share one or more vehicles, they can spread all the associated costs amongst themselves while retaining much of the personal convenience of owning a car. Conventional wisdom about car sharing is that each shared car takes six to eight other vehicles off the road, reduces greenhouse gas emissions per driver by at least 50%, and saves each driver thousands of dollars per year in payments, insurance, parking etc. It turns out that some friends of ours were Autoshare members a few years ago and we never even knew; they praised the system as being seamless and highly convenient.
Locally, we have two car sharing options: Toronto Autoshare and Zipcar, which is a commercial company that operates in a number of North American cities, and is just opening a new branch in Vancouver. There are car sharing plans in a number of Canadian cities, by the way; if you want an up-to-date list, visit the carsharing.ca website, which has a bunch of useful information. The various organizations differ widely in what they offer and in how they offer it, and in many places you may not have a choice. I did have the luxury of doing comparison shopping, so I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to check out both Toronto Autoshare and Zipcar.
Both organizations have slick websites and fairly comparable fleets, but initially I leaned toward Autoshare because it's a locally run organization and appeared to be member-owned. Its hourly rate for car usage was slightly lower than Zipcar's, and it had one other stellar advantage: Autoshare's cars are parked individually all over the city, and there were three of them, on three different sidestreets, within a five minute walk of my house. Zipcar, by contrast, makes do with leased lots that concentrate a few cars in one place, and the nearest lot was a ten or fifteen minute walk away. This may not sound very far, but I wanted something I or my wife could get to on foot with (potentially) a sick daughter and her car seat in tow. (Unexpected trips to the doctor's office were one of the motivators for occasionally needing another car.) Autoshare also has some interesting vehicles, and I thought it would be cool to be able to take a Prius or Mini for a spontaneous test drive.
And you know, I would have gone with Autoshare, except for one little detail: the cost to join Toronto Autoshare was much higher than the cost to join Zipcar (by a couple hundred dollars, when all was said and done). To be fair, the difference is mostly in the form of a deposit that Autoshare will return to you if you muster out of the co-op, and that deposit has come down in price a lot recently. On paper, and summed over time, Autoshare is probably cheaper than Zipcar. But for us, it was a question of ready cash. Zipcar only cost $85 to join per person, so it edged out Autoshare for us. Since I'm approaching the Gradually Greening posts as a consumer, rather than as someone ideologically committed to cooperatives and the green lifestyle, it seemed logical to follow a consumer's logic here. Zipcar was easier to join.
Having made my choice, the rest was simple: you can join straight from Zipcar's website (the same is true for Autoshare). I just had to include credit card information, address, and driver's license info. The Zipcar smart card arrived in the mail three days later, before they'd even finished doing the background check on me. The membership went through the following day. My wife's experience was similar.
The smart card, as it turns out, is your 'key' to the Zipcars. You wave the card over the car's windshield and if you've booked it, it unlocks for you. You can book a car over the phone or online, and if you do it online Zipcar has a great system of maps showing where the cars are and when they're available. (I do find the Zipcar website a bit cutesy, but it's also highly efficient.) It literally takes only a couple of clicks to book a car.
Both Autoshare and Zipcar warn you ahead of time that the weekends are the busy period; they tell you not to be disappointed if you can't make a same-day booking on Saturday or Sunday. So far, I haven't found this to be the case. In fact, there's been a car available at the local lot whenever I've needed one. It costs about $11/hour with my plan to drive one.
Now, this is where the devil hides in the details. I'm not disappointed with Zipcar, and I'm sure my experience with another plan would be similar. The thing is, though, that so far I'm finding I need a car for longer periods rather than shorter. I've had a couple of days when I needed an extra car for eight or more hours; at that point, the full-day billing rate comes in and while that's competitive, it can be cheaper to rent a car for the same period from a traditional car rental agency. The economic advantage of car sharing, in other words, is very sensitive to the particular uses you're going to put it to. The shorter your trips, the more economical it is.
I suppose this should be obvious, but I hadn't thought to compare the daily car sharing rate with typical one-day rental car costs. If you're thinking about, say, using an autoshare for occasional trips to customer sites on the far side of the city (or other similar situations where you don't know exactly how long you'll need the car and you're going to be driving a fair distance) then a traditional rental might be more economical, and if you're not driving very far or it's a one-way trip, a cab will probably work best. Autosharing is best thought of as a filling a niche somewhere between rentals and cabs, and it can take some time to figure out whether it's the best fit for your needs. I think it will serve us well; but it's not really a second car and I wouldn't slavishly use it alone. There will be times when a cab or a rental make more sense.
There is one other little thing. I realize that this would be very hard to implement, but one small fact that seriously reduces the utility of car sharing is the requirement that you bring the car back to the spot where you picked it up. Clearly, it simplifies everything to have this requirement: you always know where your cars are going to be at the end of the day, and you can guarantee good coverage across the city. But imagine a situation where, for instance, you want to get to the airport. You can't make that trip with a Zipcar, because you can't leave it at the airport; but a cab can easily cost $50 or more to make that trip in a big city. There is a very broad class of similar scenarios that are excluded from autosharing's repertoire for precisely this reason.
And maybe that's not a bad thing; autosharing won't put cab drivers out of business any time soon. For what it does do, it's a fully-matured service that I think everyone should consider if they live in a big city and have a diverse range of transit and travel needs.
