Car Sharing

Zipcar kicked off its second annual Low-Car Diet challenge today in the 13 cities around the country where the company does business. The challenge asks participants to give up their personal cars for one month and walk, ride a bicycle, and take transit in place of driving.

Welcome to town Chase.  I'm super impressed you have been reading Streetsblog San Francisco and made an ad that reflects some of the knowledge you've acquired here. This is obviously a shout out to the car-free community. Might the admen understand the incredible cost savings of ditching the car for a bike, which can save you more than $9,000 every year in direct vehicle costs, not to mention the health savings from an active lifestyle and the peace of mind of contributing fewer greenhouse gases to a dangerously warming planet?

Wow! We are honored. Treehugger blogs dozens of green-goings-on throughout the U.S. and the world everyday (so many some say it is hard to read them all!) We get regularly featured with some of our posts and films and we are very thankful. But even more exciting is the fact that Streetfilms, Streetsblog and the … Continued

Electric Vehicles (EVs) are all the rage these days and the press seems to treat them as a palliative for all that ails our fossil-fuel-driven, automobile-dependent transportation network.  The New York Times has fallen in love with Better Place, an electric-car battery maker that seeks to replace much of the U.S. fleet of vehicles with ones that run on electric batteries, which could be changed at battery stations much the way we currently fill up at gas stations.

Editor's note: Yesterday we asked readers to write and share their stories about car-sharing. This is the first installment. We'd like to know how you feel about car-sharing services, whether they've changed your transportation choices and travel behavior, whether you've sold your personal car, or held off on buying a new vehicle. Feel free to send your story to tips@sf.streetsblog.org.

A spirited debate broke out a few weeks back on the Car-free Living listserv run by Livable City about the merits of car sharing. Does it reduce driving and car ownership or increase the impetus to drive among the car-free? One poster who didn't own his own car called car-sharing a gateway drug that encouraged him to increase the number of times he uses a vehicle for all manner of trips, while others argued that VMT is reduced when fewer people own their own cars and share more.