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The Front Line
23 March 2002

Beetles battle the jams that bug the Bay Area: Chloe Veltman on a scheme that hopes to persuade residents to sell their cars and drive communal vehicles instead

The mission of San Francisco's City Car Share organisation, a car-hire company, sounds hopelessly self-defeating: its aim is to reduce car use.

"We are looking for ways to wean Americans off their dependence on cars," said Kate White, City Car Share's co-founder and deputy director.

The task appears huge: the US has about 185m licensed drivers and more than 130m cars on the road, consuming 40 per cent of the world's petrol supply. Getting the nation's citizens out from behind the wheel is notoriously difficult.

But if the team behind City Car Share gets its way, Bay Area residents will be selling their cars, converting their garages into yoga dens and driving communal pea-green Volkswagen Beetles across the Golden Gate Bridge instead.

City Car Share is a non-profit car-hire programme and has been running for one year, having started with a Dollars 750,000 (Pounds 535,000) grant from the federal government, which has since been renewed. So far, the organisation has also received Dollars 400,000 from local authorities and foundations.

Like similar schemes in cities such as Portland, Chicago and Seattle, City Car Share provides cars for hire at short notice from local garages. Drivers pay for the hours they use the car. It benefits occasional drivers, saving them from the costs of maintenance, insurance and the other problems of owning a vehicle. Scheme members - who might be individuals, families or businesses - pay from Dollars 25 to join plus from Dollars 10 in monthly fees.

It might sound a bargain, but such car sharing can be expensive when the hiring charges are added: Dollars 2.50 an hour plus 45 cents a mile. This limits hiring mostly to local use. "If you drive a lot, car sharing generally doesn't save money," said Atle Erlingsson, representative of the American Automobile Association. Traditional car-hire companies - such as Enterprise, with which City Car Share has a link - are more economical for long distances.

But this doesn't worry the organisation, which sees itself more as an extension of public transport. "Our first choice would be for people to use bicycles or public transport," said Annie Bourdon, the company's outreach manager.

The company hopes one day to have cars available at every Bay Area train station and is in talks with the local transport authority to be part of the area's Translink scheme - a system that incorporates several types of public transport on a single payment card.

The ecological benefits of car sharing go beyond simple car use: it is also beginning to affect urban land use. For example, Patrick Kennedy, a developer in the Berkeley district, decided not to build individual parking spaces for every unit in a new development. Instead, he opted to house City Car Share cars on the site, saving space and money. "If cities allow car-share vehicles as alternatives to multiple parking spaces, the savings could be huge," said Kennedy.

His initiative is a measure of how popular car sharing is becoming. Since its launch, City Car Share has enlisted 1,300 clients and recently expanded into Berkeley and Oakland and it has found many people are happy to ditch their own vehicles. "The car was such a drain on my finances," said San Francisco resident Amanda Dobbins. "Now, I just walk across the street, pick up a VW Beetle and go."

Dobbins's local car-share depot in Pacific Heights is one of 13 in the city. After reserving a vehicle online or by telephone, she walks to the pick-up area, uses a computerised key to open the car door and drives away. An on-board computer tracks the mileage and hours and the customer is billed monthly.

Car sharing only reached the US in 1998, but in Europe dates back to 1987 with the launch of Mobility Car Share in Switzerland. Based on the observation that people rarely use their cars more than an hour a day on average, Mobility saw that many people could share a small number of cars, thus saving money and the environment.

The idea spread and today Europe has 240 car-sharing schemes. Mobility has 40 per cent of the European market share with 1,700 cars and 34,000 customers.

With traffic congestion repeatedly topping the list of Bay Area problems, staff at City Car Share are dreaming of a world in which green VW Beetles are the only vehicles on the road - apart from other forms of public transport and bicycles, of course.