Clearing the Roads

By Margot Roosevelt

Grace Kim refuses to own a car. But at least once a month, the Seattle architect drives 30 miles to the suburbs to visit her mother. If she's in the mood, she'll cruise out to the airport to pick up friends. Occasionally, she wants a car to lug home groceries in bulk or try a new restaurant across town. And when clients need to visit a building site, Kim is at the wheel.

All that's possible because Kim and her husband, architect Michael Mariano, are members of Flexcar, one of more than a dozen car-sharing companies revving up across the U.S. As such, the pair have only to jump on the Internet or call a local number to reserve one of several vehicles parked in their neighborhood. They can choose between a Honda, a Lexus, a minivan for carting equipment or, for a jaunty weekend outing, a silver Mazda Miata. They can enter the car any time of night or day with a security-coded electronic card, get charged by the hour thanks to an in-car transmitter, and receive the bill at the end of the month. "We're ecstatic," says Kim.

You don't have to own a well to get water or a generator to get electricity. Must you own a car (or two or three) to drive? "You can join a mobility plan, like you join a cell-phone plan," says Dan Sturges, a transportation researcher for WestStart, a nonprofit based in Pasadena, Calif. "It is self-service, on-demand, pay as you go. And you get different vehicles for different needs."

It's a new way of thinking for the U.S.'s gridlocked cities--hassle-free, hourly rental, a concept that has been popular in Europe for two decades. For every vehicle in a car-sharing fleet, transportation planners say about 10 cars are taken off the roads. Moreover, when drivers pay by the hour, they tend to drive less. They walk more, take the occasional bus or clump their errands together in one trip. While car sharing is now available in nine big cities and a score of smaller towns, in many places the operations are still seedling, with just a few cars. Expansion is under way, however, and car-sharing companies plan to bring the service to more than two dozen major metropolitan areas--a trend that could eventually remove tens of thousands of cars from the highways, reducing pollution, energy use and congestion.

Cities love the idea and are actively encouraging it. In Seattle, the municipal government runs a "One Car Challenge," doling out $50 a month in free Flexcar use for a year to people who can prove they sold their family's second car in favor of car sharing. In Portland, Ore., people whose automobiles fail emissions tests get $500 worth of free Flexcar use if they junk their cars. Outside Washington, the Virginia suburbs of Alexandria and Arlington pay membership fees for any residents who want to join a car-sharing plan. In Greenbelt, Md., the city leases a vehicle from Zipcar, a Massachusetts-based car-sharing firm, stationing it at a senior-citizens complex and renting it to elderly residents for only $1 an hour. And in Philadelphia, officials are auctioning off 329 vehicles from the municipal fleet and using PhillyCarShare, a local nonprofit, as an alternative. Projected savings: $1 million a year.

How revolutionary will this be? If car sharing is to have a national impact on congestion, it must surmount a basic paradox: everyone hates traffic and smog, but few people are willing to give up their cars. In the U.S., as the saying goes, you are what you drive. And a half-century of highway subsidies has only fueled the sense of entitlement. According to a poll on traffic by TIME, ABC News and the Washington Post, only 10% of those surveyed who have access to mass transit actually use it regularly. "There's a stigma to not owning a car," says Kim, the Seattle architect. "People say, 'Hey, you're wearing a nice jacket--can't you afford a car?'" Now car-sharing firms are out to prove that their communal approach offers its own attractions: freedom--and even convenience. As a Zipcar ad put it, "350 hours/year having sex. 420 looking for parking. What's wrong with this picture?" In Boston, New York and Washington, almost all of Zipcar's 32,000 customers are within a seven-minute walk of a company car. "Our members are savvy," says CEO Scott Griffith. "They don't need to own a car to enjoy mobility."

Convenience aside, car-sharing firms are betting that their growth will come from people looking to save money. Consumers, they hope, will figure out that they could save enough for an annual vacation in Hawaii if they just switched from owning to sharing. Or merely gave up that second or third car. The American Automobile Association estimates that it costs an average $703 a month to own a modest vehicle--what with payments, depreciation, insurance, maintenance and gasoline. Yet government surveys show that most cars are driven only about an hour a day. Those same 30 hours a month would cost less than $300 in a car-share program. Zipcar and Seattle-based Flexcar, the industry leaders, charge an annual membership fee of $25 to $50 and an hourly rate of $7.50 to $10, depending on the user's monthly driving plan (drive more, pay less). And that hourly charge includes insurance, parking, maintenance and fuel (a company credit card in the glove compartment is available for when you fill the tank). Traditional rental cars, by contrast, typically require more paperwork and are usually available only by the day, at fees that range from $25 to $150 but don't include insurance or gas. "It is a dollars-and-cents equation," says Flexcar CEO Lance Ayrault. "Do the math and ask yourself, 'Why do I own that thing?'"

For Fran Trowbridge, 72, a retiree, the answer was easy. Two Flexcars are stationed in the garage of a Seattle high-rise next to hers. A month after joining Flexcar, she sold her Ford Taurus. Insurance had cost her more than she pays for 10 hours of monthly car-share fees, which is all she needs to shop and visit friends. "And I sure don't miss the maintenance and lubing part," she says. Similarly, for the Steelquists--a two-job, two-kid, two-car family--price was a motive. "We wanted to dial back on expenses and also reduce our impact on the environment," says Joan Steelquist, who works for a Seattle nonprofit group. After enrolling in the city's One Car Challenge last summer, the Steelquists downsized to a single 1989 Chevy Geo. Joan uses Flexcars to get to her part-time teaching job once a week. And she can drive her son Reuben, 11, to Boy Scout meetings on Thursday nights--and grocery-shop while she's at it--while her husband is off somewhere else with the Geo. Moreover, she adds, "sharing cars with others gives me the good feeling of being part of a community."

Worldwide, 280,000 people belong to car-share programs, nearly three-quarters of them in Europe, according to Susan Shaheen, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. The idea spread to the U.S. in 1998, with the opening of a small company in Portland, Ore. Since then, the movement has grown to 14 firms with 62,000 members in 14 states and the District of Columbia. The firms range from ambitious outfits like Zipcar and Flexcar, which are each adding as many as 1,000 members a month, to modest start-ups like the Dancing Rabbit Vehicle Co-operative in Rutledge, Mo., and Roaring Fork Vehicles in Aspen, Colo. Zipcar and Flexcar, zealous rivals, both say they will break even for the first time next month, even while they are preparing to expand into new markets from Chicago to Denver and Minneapolis. Across the U.S., car-sharing membership and revenues are expected to grow tenfold over the next five years. Says Shaheen: "A lot of innovative people are passionate about car sharing--because it makes sense."

Among the enthusiasts are transit officials desperately seeking to boost ridership on buses and trains. Car sharing is not designed for traveling from home to work and back--the cost would be too high for a 10-hour day. But, stationed near office buildings and along rail lines, shared cars offer "mobility insurance" for workers who avoid mass transit because they just might need a car for a midday errand. The message: If you must own a car, leave it in your garage at home. Washington Metro officials have placed 107 Flexcars and Zipcars at 66 city and suburban stations. And downtown Seattle has 35 Flexcars so that members can scoot across town for lunch or a parent-teacher meeting. "Car sharing is not a silver bullet," says Ref Lindmark, a transportation planner for King County, Wash. "But it gives people another reason to ride the bus." And, he adds, it is a lot cheaper than building million-dollar parking lots and billion-dollar highways.

Increasingly, businesses are seeing car sharing as a way to cut costs on their fleets: Corporate accounts now make up at least 40% of Flexcar and Zipcar revenues. Some companies even offer access as a perk to employees by allowing use of the cars for personal errands--much as they might subsidize a gym membership. In downtown San Diego, 14 corporations share a fleet of 10 Flexcars, thus reducing their need to buy company cars. In Seattle, URS Corp., an engineering firm, sold five of its nine fleet cars after signing up with Flexcar, saving $12,000 a year in parking fees alone. And in Manhattan, Elan Ackerman, who runs a small events-marketing firm, uses Zipcars to pick up disc jockeys at the airport ("They like to be pampered") and deliver cases of Tiger Beer, his main client. His car-sharing bill amounts to $150 a month for both personal and business errands. "It's become essential," he says. "Parking alone in Manhattan would cost me $400 a month."

So far, sharing cars works best in dense city neighborhoods, where people can easily walk to them. Last year Flexcar had to scale back temporarily in Los Angeles, after scattering its 30 vehicles too widely among the city's vast low-rise neighborhoods. Eventually, if car sharing makes inroads in the suburbs, it would probably be in urbanized pockets, where office complexes and subdivisions would see it as an extra amenity. Wellesley College, in the Boston suburbs, makes Zipcars available to all its students, and a score of other universities have also partnered with car-sharing groups. In the end, however, convenience is fundamental. Even Berkeley-based Shaheen, the acknowledged guru of car sharing, isn't a member of the Bay Area's City CarShare because, so far, none of the company's 85 vehicles are close to her home. "They'd have to put one at the bottom of my hill," she says.

And then there is another small matter: Will animal lovers give up their SUVs when they discover that car-share companies require Fido to be kept in a pet carrier? "Leave the car cleaner than you found it--no hair, no pee, no odors, no quills or feathers or yolks," warn Zipcar's rules. In Seattle, the Steelquists are grappling with the issue, as their Australian shepherd, Loki, takes a dim view of confinement. "Maybe someday they'll have dog-friendly cars," says Joan, wistfully.