Cars Earn their Keep

Cascadia Scorecard News
January 2007

Let’s start by stating the obvious: Cars and trucks are everywhere. Cascadia has substantially more motor vehicles than licensed drivers. And everywhere you go, you see parked cars filling lots and lining the streets. In the moving cars, you see empty seats. That’s a mind-boggling stock of underutilized capital. Aside from our homes, most of us northwesterners have more money tied up in our cars than in any other physical assets. Those spare seats in a single-occupant car, or a parked one, are just sitting there, depreciating.

Forget jet packs and flying cars, the transportation wave of the future may be more about taking advantage of all those idle cars and unused seats. Enter two ideas based on the benefits of sharing, both getting a boost by advances in information technology: high-tech hitchhiking and renting our parked cars:

• Rent that ride: Imagine flipping the “rent me” button on your dash as you leave town for a week and coming back to learn that your vehicle had earned you $300 on the rental market, or renting it out for the afternoon while you are at your desk. On the flip side, imagine that you could access, on a moment’s notice, thousands of private cars and trucks sprinkled around your city. (Details on renting your ride.)
  
• High-tech hitchhiking: Picture getting ready for your morning commute. You send a text message about your schedule and location to the central computer, which instantly matches you with others going the same way. Your ride gets a map of your location on his or her phone and picks you up at your door for a speedy, well speedier, ride in the commuter lane and you spilt the cost of fuel through a centralized billing system. (More on high-tech hitching.)
  

New technologies and systems are poised to build the infrastructure for renting out all those off-duty vehicles and seats—text messaging, mapping software, smart cards, onboard computers and GPS trackers, online reservation and billing systems, refueling and car washing systems.

Yes, there are practical obstacles to making this kind of car sharing a reality. There would need to be enough participants to create an economy of scale so there is a car or ride available when and where you need one, and renter-outers need to make enough money to make it worth their while. There are questions of liability, and insurance, and payment. And of course making the leap to let others use our cars—especially considering that we Americans often have close personal relationships with our vehicles.

While personal jet packs are still the stuff of sci-fi, companies such as Flexcar and ZipCar have already been hard at work reducing the obstacles to car-sharing pools. The German car-share company Choice has gone from toying with this idea of renting off-duty vehicles to road-testing a system called CashCar. And Seattle start-up Goose Networks built a real-time ridesharing system that links riders with drivers. Some 200 Microsoft employees who live in central Seattle are currently testing the system.

Advances in information technology and innovations in car-sharing could converge with trends such as high fuel prices, urban densification, and caps on carbon emissions to create a thriving market for these forms of cooperation. If even a fraction of a percentage of car owners joined the trend, it would be enough to create explosive growth in the car-share fleet.

From a community-wide perspective, high-tech hitch-hiking and idle-car rental would conserve a lot of resources. You might shed one or more of your household’s own vehicles if you knew there were a hundred at your disposal within a few minute’s walk. The more we share rides, the fewer cars and trucks we’ll need in our cities. And the fewer vehicles, the less fuel gets burned, the fewer collisions happen, the cleaner air we’ll breathe, and the less time we’ll sit idle in traffic jams with no one in the passenger seat to talk to.

So if you could, would you do it? Comment below.

Pass this article on

Read more on:
High Tech Hitchhiking

Renting Idle Cars