Streetsblog San Francisco

Car share members in San Francisco could soon be picking up their vehicles from exclusive curbside parking spaces. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) is launching a pilot program in mid-August to test at least ten on-street car share “pods” as part of its SFPark program.

“On-street car sharing pods (i.e., locations where users can pick up a car sharing vehicle) can encourage car sharing by increasing the visibility of car sharing, improving the proximity to trip origins, and increasing the total number of pods,” says an SFMTA document [pdf] on the pilot.

The pilot is a partnership between the SFMTA, the non-profit City CarShare, and the City Administrator’s Office and will include at least five confirmed pods on Polk and Greenwich, Taylor and Pacific, Harriet and Folsom, Valencia and 17th, and Clay and Fillmore.

If it proves successful, SFMTA CFO Sonali Bose said on-street car share spaces could be expanded citywide and rented by any car share company that fits the agency’s criteria.

The SFMTA says it plans to mark the spaces with paint and signage paid for by City CarShare, which would rent the spots for $150 per month and be responsible for maintenance.

The SF Board of Supervisors approved an amendment to the Transportation Code today that prohibits unpermitted vehicles from parking in on-street car share spaces. The SFMTA plans to produce stickers to mark permitted car share vehicles, the SFMTA document says.

All but one of the six originally proposed spots were approved at a public hearing on July 1 after neighbors voiced complaints about a spot to be located at Union and Hyde Streets. SFMTA staff said they would come back with an alternate proposal for the location, but the SFMTA Board of Directors is expected to green light the other spots in the coming weeks.

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According to the new San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency 2010 Transportation Fact Sheet, the number of car-free households increased. Last year [pdf], data show that 29.8 percent of households had no car, a number than climbed to 30.3 percent this year [pdf]. Oddly, it seems the shift came mostly from households with one car, as some migrated to car-lessness, while others increased the numbers of cars in their households. In real numbers, there was only a slight uptick in households with no cars, or nearly 2,000. About 1,000 more households had two cars or more, while 4,000 more had at least three cars.

What factors do you think led to these numbers? Was it car-share, more biking, more walking, more telecommuting, higher unemployment? Remember to take into account that these numbers are from the 2008 and 2009 census data, respectively.

Tell me what you think in the comments. How do you think this will change next year?

H/T Jason Henderson, SF State Geography Professor

As more teens wait to get their licenses and young adults drive fewer miles annually, advertisers have begun to point to advances in digital technology to explain the trend. Many younger adults use digital media to connect to their friends virtually, the argument goes, and technological innovations will likely reduce the incentive to own and operate a car.

Now, with the passage of a new law in California that allows current car owners to share their personal vehicles in a car sharing service and make money without voiding their personal insurance policy, the age of owning a car as a rite of American adulthood may be ceding to a new vision of vehicles as a social service.

Because your car spends on average more than 90 percent of the time parked and idle, proponents of personal vehicle sharing argue, why not make money instead of sitting by as your investment depreciates in a garage?

“We feel like this is a historic moment. This legislation basically revolutionizes the idea of the automobile into being a shared service,” said Sunil Paul, CEO of Spride Inc, a personal car-sharing start-up company. “We think it can have a huge impact over the next many years about the way we think about the automobile.”

On the heels of the announcement that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed AB 1871 into law yesterday, Spride and City Carshare, the San Francisco non-profit that helped pioneer car sharing, announced a partnership to facilitate personal car sharing in the Bay Area. Once AB 1871 takes effect January 1st, the new Spride Share pilot program will allow car owners to loan their vehicles to the more than 13,000 screened and qualified members of City CarShare, offsetting the costs and environmental impact of private car ownership while providing City CarShare members with access to a greater variety of vehicles.

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The possibility that Californians will be allowed to share their personal cars within car-sharing pools and receive compensation for gas, maintenance, and wear to the vehicle moved a step closer to reality yesterday, as a State Senate committee voted unanimously to approve AB 1871, a bill that would prevent car insurance companies from voiding personal insurance if vehicle owners are compensated for the use of their cars.

California Assemblymember and Democratic candidate for insurance commissioner Dave Jones (D-Sacramento) has been working with insurance companies and fellow lawmakers to pass the legislation that in theory could dramatically change the nature of vehicle ownership for drivers participating in personal car-share. Jones and other supporters imagine the bill will pave the way for reduced car-ownership, particularly in suburban areas, as social networks or church groups, for instance, make use of private vehicles, which otherwise spend an average of 90 percent of the time idle.

Supporters contend that removing the barrier to personal car-share will be an economic help to vehicle owners and will spur entrepreneurial innovations. Personal vehicle sharing in theory could be tailored as specifically or as generally as each participant wished.

"It's technically feasible and economically viable to have an arrangement where you decide that the only people you want to share your car are your Facebook friends or some other universe that is a part of your social network," Jones told Streetsblog.

After the bill flew through the Assembly with unanimous support, Jones was optimistic the Senate would view it favorably as well. The vote at  yesterday's Senate Banking, Finance, and Insurance committee was 10-0.

According to Jones' office, the bill will likely proceed to the Senate floor for a vote in early August, though it could be sooner. If Governor Schwarzenegger signs the bill into law, theoretically by Labor Day, it would take effect January 1st, 2011.

San Francisco could eventually see car-sharing come to the curbside after the Planning Commission voted yesterday to urge the city to explore the idea of allowing on-street car-share pods. The commission also voted to start a process of updating the city's guidelines for car-share requirements in new buildings.

Car sharing first came to San Francisco in 2001, and just a year later, the Planning Commission began requiring some new buildings to include car-share spaces as a condition of project approval. According to the Planning Department, San Francisco is the only city that requires car-share spaces for many new buildings by law, a policy it adopted in 2005.

Almost all of the city's car-share parking space, or pods, are in private garages and lots, where they've been required as part of a building's approval for construction, or where building owners have voluntarily leased out spaces to one of the city's two major car-share organizations, City CarShare and ZipCar.

That could soon change, as the Planning Commission urged the city to study using some public on-street spaces as car-share pods.

Planning Department staff wrote in a memo [PDF] that providing on-street car-share parking spaces could greatly expand the number of available spaces, increase car-sharing's legitimacy and visibility, make it feel safer for people who don't want to go into garages, and make more efficient use of on-street spaces that otherwise often stay occupied by one person's vehicle all day.

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The California Assembly voted unanimously yesterday to support AB 1871, a bill that would allow car owners to share their personal vehicles in coordination with car-sharing services without voiding their personal auto insurance. The bill opens the door to redefining car ownership, leading to economic, environmental and traffic congestion improvements, according to its sponsors.

"What's exciting about this bill is it will facilitate more car sharing," said Assemblymember Dave Jones (D-Sacramento). Jones said personal car sharing reduces the need to own a car in the first place, lowers the cost of owning the car that you've already purchased and reduces overall traffic and parking problems. "This will allow us to take car-sharing to the next level."

Several services, such as Divvy Car and Relay Rides, already help individual car owners share their vehicles, though current California insurance laws permit insurers to void personal car insurance policies if owners receive compensation for the service. Unless drivers obtain a livery or commercial license, getting money for a ride has to be as informal as sharing gas expenses among a carpool. Other programs for helping seniors who are too old to drive, like the Independent Transportation Network and Neighbor Ride, rely on the goodwill of volunteers and charitable organizations.

If AB 1871 becomes law in California, drivers will be able to offer their own vehicles through car-sharing companies to a network of their choosing. Because cars are unused on average more than 90 percent of the time, owners could get money for an asset that is otherwise unused and depreciating.

"Usually the cost of owning a car is $400-800 a month, assuming it's a reasonably nice car," said Sunil Paul, CEO of car-share start-up Spride Share and a supporter of the bill. "If you earn a couple hundred bucks a month, that goes a long way toward covering your expenses."

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TransForm's annual Car-Free Challenge is coming up in a few weeks and they've produced this video to get you in the spirit. If you'll remember last year we profiled several inspirational participants who demonstrated that you don't need a ride to raise a family and the mystique of a driver's license as personal ticket to freedom doesn't hold sway for some teenagers in the East Bay.

If you're already car-free or car-lite, they still want you to sign up and give inspiration to those who might not think it's possible to drive less or not at all.

As TransForm's Susanna Handow noted, the "walk-bike-transit-athon" was a real inspiration last year for participants and they expect a larger pool of challengers this year. Beyond a week of reduced driving, said Handow, they hope the event inspires year-long changes to habits that encourage better health and a lower carbon footprint. We'll be tracking the stories and highlighting some of them on Streetsblog. Hopefully you'll be among them.

(Editor's note: This is an Op-Ed from Jason Henderson, Geography Professor at San Francisco State University, who is writing a book on the politics of mobility in cities. He grew up in New Orleans where he spent much time in the coastal wetlands of Louisiana while also observing the activity of the oil and gas industry. He has never owned a car.)

For almost a century my native Louisiana has been expendable when it comes to America's voracious appetite for oil. Now after over a week of national media attention, the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill is suddenly big enough to bring President Obama down for a disaster tour this past Sunday.

No one can say when the gushing river of oil will stop. But as we watch and ponder this sorry state of affairs, environmentalists will demand loudly that Obama retract his earlier proposal to loosen offshore drilling policy. Perhaps they are right, but like other Americans, most of those same people will likely keep on driving. So I take this moment to urge environmentalists to reflect upon their relationship between oil and driving. We need oil and are lucky as a civilization to be endowed with oil, but most people are squandering this precious resource by driving. We need to use oil more wisely.

I see incredible value in oil. It is one of the most utilitarian natural resources known to humans. Oil stores tremendous amounts of energy, it is very easy to transport long distances by pipeline, rail, ship, and by truck, and it can sit for a long time without degrading. It can be refined and distilled easily and its petroleum by-products are used in plastics and pharmaceuticals, and are part of the food system.

Wind turbines and solar panels are made from polymers that come from oil. The new alternative energy future promoted by environmentalists will be made from oil. Growing plants to drive cars also requires oil. Oil will be needed to build new high speed rail lines, bicycle networks, light rail systems, electric buses, and new ways of organizing work and shopping through compact urban development. In sum, we'll need to keep drilling for oil so that we can shift to a more sustainable energy path that significantly reduces our overall dependence on oil.

As many environmentalists point out, we do not need to keep drilling everywhere. We do not need to keep searching further offshore, or push into remote, wild areas, or burn toxic tar sands. We need to conserve. We need to reduce per-capita consumption. But most importantly, we need to stop driving everywhere for everything so that oil can be used more intelligently and judiciously.

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Car sharing is a growth industry, as pioneer City CarShare would tell you, and it has beneficial environmental and economic impacts. Studies of car sharing services like Zipcar and City CarShare show that for every car that is shared, up to 15 private vehicles are taken off the road. Owning and operating a personal car is the second-highest family expense behind owning a house, and the highest expense for people who rent.

The car sharing model, however, is predicated on operating in dense urban areas where there is good transit and a large pool of prospective customers who don't want to own a car. On the other hand, it doesn't make financial sense for car sharing companies to operate in suburbs or rural areas. Not yet, at least.

City CarShare is trying to pioneer personal vehicle sharing, where car owners would make their vehicles available to a pre-screened pool of personal vehicle sharing participants during the periods of the day when their car is not in use, which for many vehicles is upwards of 90 percent of the time.

If you drove to work in San Francisco and left your car idle from 8 am to 6 pm, for instance, you could allow a pool of prospective vehicle share participants to use your car, for which you would make enough money to cover the cost of usage. If you consider the cost of owning and insuring your car to already be a sunken expense, this could be a way to "make" money for a commodity that is otherwise depreciating in value.

Of the many challenges to expanding car sharing to privately owned vehicles, the first obstacle is current insurance law. In most states, unless you are commercially licensed or you operate a livery service, receiving compensation from others for using your vehicle voids your personal car insurance coverage.

To this end, City CarShare has been working with California State Assemblymember Dave Jones (D-Sacramento) and Spride Share, a new company started by cleantech financier Sunil Paul of Spring Ventures, to draft Assembly Bill 1871, which would change insurance law to permit remuneration for personal vehicle sharing.

"The idea is to make it possible for people to participate in car-sharing programs," said Assemblymember Jones. "This is part of a package of approaches that look at ways we can engage insurance companies in a positive way to encourage better environmental behavior."

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When it comes to building new developments in the Bay Area, especially in San Francisco, the battle over limiting the construction of new parking spaces is pitched. Parking reform advocacy organizations like Livable City, which maintains a listserv populated by car-free and livable-city advocates keeping a keen watch on planning commission parking exemptions, have long encouraged city leaders to tighten the parking-to-unit ratios in dense neighborhoods flush with transit and bicycling options.

Why, these advocates ask, would any city seeking to be a model of sustainability require developments to have one parking space per unit, as is the case across San Francisco outside of the downtown core and certain neighborhood plan zones (the mandatory parking ratio can be higher in other Bay Area cities)? San Francisco is the city it is because it was built densely, with minimal parking, and areas like the Mission or North Beach would be impossible with 1:1 ratios.

And who should they hang for granting variances permitting higher than 2:1 ratios, as happened last week when a two-unit home at 2626 Larkin Street in Russian Hill received permission from the San Francisco Planning Commission to build five parking spaces, one with a parking stacker for additional cars?

When these questions are asked of city planners and developers, like they were during the struggle to limit parking at 299 Valencia Street, advocates and political leaders are led to believe that it is impossible to finance new developments, particularly condos and non-rental properties, without the maximum parking ratio possible. Less parking, goes the developer refrain, banks will refuse to loan and the units will be impossible to re-sell.

Not all developers buy that argument, however, and some have buildings that disprove it.

"If you are doing a project next to BART or many buses, you really don't need to have a lot of cars," said Oz Erickson, Chairman of the Emerald Fund, Inc, a developer who has built more than 2,000 units in San Francisco. Emerald's newest development, a rental building at 333 Harrison Street in Rincon Hill, will be built with a .5:1 parking-to-unit ratio, even though the developer could appeal for a variance to build more parking.

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