Zipcar

[jbailey]

In Montreal, we participated in a carshare called Communauto. The goal of Communauto is to have a car at least every 500 metres across the island of Montreal. In practice for areas they serve, they usually had more than that. The Saint-Sacrement location had at least a dozen, and there were clusters of 3 or 4 within a couple minutes walking distance of anywhere on the plateau.

Such a thing does exist here, but not in Silicon Valley at all. If you're in the valley at all and wish you didn't need to have a car for little errands, or are thinking about a second car for those times you just want to go somewhere different from your mate, *please* add your name to the notify list for zipcar:

http://www.zipcar.com/notify-me

The problem this solves is the one that a bus or a bike can get one to work easily enough, or into the city, but the bus is never going to be great for the once-a-week grocery shop, or that trip to Ikea. In that case, you pay the use of the car for an hour (or 4 if it's Ikea...), and then return it. I really believe that it's a critical part of making mass-transit work.

Comments

[jbailey.livejournal.com]

yup, and it's stupid. So many people here own or want second cars. It's almost tempting to just start a car share, myself.

[northernflights.livejournal.com]

Sure, why not? With the goal of being acquired by ZC? You can bet that Flexcar was sold at a profit.

[jbailey.livejournal.com]

Visa restrictions and not having time to focus on growing it. It would need some advertising, even in poster form or something to make sure that folks knew about it. Otherwise I'd have purchased a pile of cars with expensive insurance, and not have any money coming in.

[northernflights.livejournal.com]

All good reasons. I note without much surprise that "would need technology to schedule and track vehicle usage" didn't even make the list of non-trivial concerns.

[mcsampson.livejournal.com]

I use to work for Zipcar (sort of.. customer service rep) (left last week) and I'm pretty sure once the merge is settled after the new year that it will be available in those areas :)