Zipcar moves into D.C.'s public sector
Zipcar members across the country can rent a car for a few hours when needed. Now the car-sharing company is offering its services to municipalities, and Washington, D.C., is the first to take it for a spin. Tamara Keith reports.
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Kai Ryssdal: In a lot of big cities around the country having a car can be more trouble than it's worth. What with parking, insurance, maintenance and the rest. A company called Zipcar took that as a challenge and came up with a car-sharing business model. Instead of having their own, Zipcar members rent one for a couple of hours to run errands. This week Zipcar moved into the public sector, offering its services and technology to cities and local governments. Washington DC is the first to try it out, as Tamara Keith reports.
TAMARA KEITH: Washington, D.C., has about 1,600 passenger cars in its fleet. City workers making inspections or assessments use them. And Deputy Mayor Dan Tangherlini says they spend a lot of time sitting in parking lots.
DAN TANGHERLINI: Just looking at the amount of hours that those cars are actually used, you find that we're paying for a lot of capacity that we're just not using.
So, D.C. is trying out the car-share concept. The city is removing about 360 vehicles from its fleet and replacing them with just 60 others equipped with Zipcar technology. Tangherlini says city workers reserve cars over the Web and then use a keycard to unlock them.
TANGHERLINI: The keys are in the car, the car is fueled, you'll take it where you're supposed to go and bring it back when you say you'll have it back.
Tangherlini says this system will save about $6 million over the next five years. Zipcar's CEO Scott Griffith says he's talking to another 15 cities about doing the same thing.
If you have a smart scheduling system and a self-service access mechanism, and you apply that to these government fleets, then you can downsize the amount of cars that governments need to serve the exact same population of users.
It's a case of technology developed in the private sector helping out the public sector, says Robert Fuentes, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.
TANGHERLINI: As these budgets are tighter they're looking for any ways for saving, and I think this is a great idea.
But not so good for car sales.
In Washington, I'm Tamara Keith for Marketplace.
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05/21/2009
It appears that Sharon and Tanya have are comparing apples to oranges, or maybe sour grapes. Zipcar is providing its fleet management **technology** to the local governments, which allows them to reduce their fleet sizes and more efficiently manage their assets (and save our tac dollars!) by deploying cars where they need to be and monitoring their usage. While Philly Car share and I-Go Car Sharing may have collaborated with municipal governments to allow their employees to access their vehicle fleets (just like any business or consumer), those initiatives did nothing to reduce the number of vehicles in those government fleets fleets. Governments need to have a dedicated pool of vehicles at their disposal to enable them to fulfill their responsibilities: social work, infrastructure, crisis management, public safety. While relying upon community car sharing fleets to support the work of municipal governments sounds nice, imagine the outcry the first time a social worker could not get to an at-risk client because no cars were available from the consumer fleet! Zipcar's groundbreaking inititative here is it's ingenious deployment of technology in the public sector, which saves money and improves the planet. Way to go Zipcar.
From Chicago, IL, 04/29/2009
Dear Marketplace:
We are happy that you are covering car sharing and new developments in transportation but your reporter missed some key facts. Zipcar was NOT the first company to provide car sharing services in the US. Plus, many non-profits have provided services to municipal fleets for years. In Chicago, I-GO Car Sharing provides service to the City of Chicago. This makes it possible for the City to have vehicles available when their employees need them and then to share the vehicles with community residents. Philly Carshare in Philadelphia, City Carshare in San Francisco/Berkeley among others have provided the same service to their communities and many municipalities prefer to work with a non-profit. The Zipcar model of providing service to municipalities will actually reduce the SHARING since those vehicles will be exclusively available to the municipality. Sharon Feigon, CEO, I-GO Car Sharing
04/28/2009
Dear Marketplace, It seems that your reporter, Tamara Keith, did no research into the subject of car-sharing organizations providing services to municipalities. It is blatantly incorrect to say that D.C. is the first municipal government to adopt car sharing as a fleet-replacement mechanism. In April 2004, the City of Philadelphia hired the nonprofit PhillyCarShare to provide car-sharing services to replace hundreds of City-owned fleet vehicles. PhillyCarShare accomplished this by providing only a handful of its own vehicles. This was a world first � that residents, businesses, and City employees would all access the same vehicles. I recommend you peruse the many articles � a small sampling of the over sixty articles published the month we launched the program in 2004: http://www.phillycarshare.org/68/vision/press-room.php The city signed up several hundred employees, saved almost $2M annually, and removed 330 vehicles from its fleet, all while spending only about $30k annually for PhillyCarShare�s services. It was so successful that hundreds of businesses signed up as a result of the tremendous publicity. Additionally, other cities soon followed Philadelphia�s leadership: Berkeley, CA; Portland, OR; Minneapolis, and San Francisco. More than twenty cities nationwide have car-sharing services, mostly operated by nonprofit organizations. Sincerely, Tanya Seaman Founding Executive Director PhillyCarShare
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