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Transit Tangents
The Podcast where we discuss all things transit. Join us as we dive into transit systems across the US, bring you interviews with experts and advocates, and engage in some fun and exciting challenges along the way.
Transit Tangents
Rethinking Car Ownership with Car Sharing
We explore how car-sharing services like Zipcar are changing urban mobility patterns and helping people reduce or eliminate personal car ownership while maintaining flexibility for special trips.
• Car sharing complements public transit with each shared vehicle taking up to 13 privately owned cars off the street
• 83% of Zipcar members don't own cars, and 27% sell their cars within a year of joining
• 63% of car-sharing members are regular transit riders who use cars for occasional needs
• Most common uses: errands (49%), grocery shopping (47%), leaving the city (41%)
• Car sharing fills the gaps in transit systems for bulky purchases, multiple errands, and time-sensitive appointments
• The service differs from ride-hailing by allowing users to keep items in the car between stops
• Car ownership typically costs $500+ monthly, making car sharing a cost-effective alternative
• Car sharing reduces parking demand and helps create more space-efficient cities
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Doors are closing Public transit. That's my way to roll On the metro. I'm taking control. Bus stops, train tracks it's my daily grind. Transit, it's the rhythm of my life.
Speaker 2:Can sharing cars help reduce traffic, cut emissions and even boost public transit. Today, we're exploring how car sharing services like Zipcar are changing the way we think about owning and using cars. All of this and more on Transit Tangents.
Speaker 1:Hey everybody, and welcome to this episode of Transit Tangents. My name is Lewis and I'm Chris, and today we are testing out our kind of first remote setup here, and we'll be doing an episode talking about the importance of car sharing to help reduce car ownership. The reason that we're doing this remotely, though, is I have officially made it to my new apartment in Germany. We talked about this on the channel several weeks ago, months ago at this point. It's been a long journey to get here, but I'm sitting on one of the only pieces of furniture that I own at this point, which is actually part of what spurred the idea for this topic, which is fairly non-conventional for a channel like ours, so focused on public transit.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, we're transit tangents for a reason, so we can go off on all kinds of different tangents, and this is still supporting the overall goal of increasing public transportation.
Speaker 1:Totally yeah, and the concept here too is, you know, going car free, especially in the United States, is difficult in a lot of cases, and you know a lot of people like Jerry and I were car light, I would say, in Austin. We had one car between the two of us. We both used our e-bikes to get around a good chunk of the time, but in some cases there are trips that you can't do on an e-bike, that are really hard to do on a bus or a train for that matter, and that's kind of where car sharing kind of enters the equation.
Speaker 2:This is something that you've probably seen in your hometown or you've seen when you're out traveling. There's a couple of different companies that have existed out there that have really tried to bring this car sharing to the masses. Lewis, what are you seeing in Germany?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it's kind of the idea for this episode is I've been trying to kind of get my apartment furnished and I've been seeing a company local here in my region called Tile Auto that has, you know, kind of essentially a system set up almost like think of it like dockable bikes, except instead of actual docks it's just like parking spots that are specific to their rental car service. But in the US we see this everywhere, with Zipcar as the kind of most prominent system. Zipcar has been around since 2000. They operate across most of the United States but also around the world, and they're kind of set up as a membership model.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, for an example, you could live in a city like Boston where, if you wanted to join Zipcar, there would be a membership fee of like $9 per month, and then you have access to a fleet of these Zipcars all over the city where you can rent them starting at about $14 an hour or about $100 per day. And that also includes things like the cost of gas, which is crazy to me that it also includes the cost of gas, although there are probably some certain mileage thresholds that you can't exceed for that gas to count. But still, really, really cool setup.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and those thresholds do exist.
Speaker 1:But, like when you compare this to the cost of, like, renting a car at your normal car rental agency or something like that, this is really cheap, especially if it is like, oh, I need to go pick up this one specific thing at a store, I need to move this piece of furniture to my friend's house or whatever it may be, where you only need the car for one or two hours.
Speaker 1:You know, renting a car for two hours in this example would be 28 bucks, versus going to rent a car from Enterprise or Hertz or whatever it may be is probably going to cost you like a hundred bucks at least. And then you have to pay for gas and you have to worry about insurance and all this other stuff all stacked on top of it. So definitely pretty convenient. And Zipcar has kind of put together this pretty cool page on their website that gives you some statistics about their users website that gives you some statistics about their users as well as a link to a paper by the Journal of Transportation Research Board that actually cites that one Zipcar takes up to 13 personally owned cars off the street. So in areas like Boston or New York where these Zipcars are prevalent. A lot of people are signing up. Taking upwards of 13 personally owned cars off the street is pretty cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's really impressive, especially considering how many cars that they probably have deployed in each of these cities. Some other cool stats that they provided and info about the Zipcar users 83% of the Zipcar members actually don't own a car at all, which is also crazy to me but 83 are using the system and they don't own a car. Uh, 27 of members actually ditch their cars within the first year of joining zip car yeah, that's.
Speaker 1:That is like super positive to me, like the first one. I think like 83 of car members not owning a car makes some sense, because if you own a car you're probably not going to be renting it that much. But 27 of people who sign up for a membership selling their car within a year is huge. That's amazing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. That's huge and such a cool stat that they can collect. But it shows the impact that services like this would have in your cities 49% of people who are Zipcar members postponed either buying or leasing a new vehicle. Because why do you need to buy or lease a new vehicle if you have access to one on your street already? And 50 percent of single car households and 50 percent of multi-car households would purchase an additional vehicle if they couldn't access Zipcar. So now you have these families, these households that probably would be in the market to buy a car anyway, but with the availability of these zip cars, they don't really need to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all of those stats are super encouraging to see, and earlier on in the episode too, you were saying it's weird that we'd be talking about this, considering we talk so heavily about public transit. But really I do see car sharing as something that is very public transit adjacent and can compliment folks who compliment the way folks get around, who are public transit users. So when you look at folks who use Zipcar, 63% of members frequently use public transportation. So 63% of people who are using Zipcar and are members use public transportation to get around. Nearly half of them ride transit more than five times per week. So these are folks who are every single day commuting to and from work or whatever it may be. They are frequent transit users who are the vast majority of people using Zipcar.
Speaker 1:And another fun fact here is 82% of the members actually walk to pick up their Zipcar, and that's because the way that their model is set up and this is similar to how the model of the one that I've mentioned here, tile Auto, where I live in Yena is that they just have like one or two parking spots spread out across all different neighborhoods. It's not like you go to this one giant parking lot somewhere that's got 100 zip cars in it. It's small, know small localized, like I said at the beginning, kind of similar to a setup of like a dockable bike system where you've got you know little nodes all over the city where you can go um and it makes it so that you could walk to go pick up the zip car so I kind of think of it as, uh, the micro mobility that we already have with the scooters, except obviously larger, but this actually predates the microility movement with all the scooters and small personal devices on the street, which is pretty cool.
Speaker 2:So why would somebody who typically uses public transit have to use a Zipcar here and there or throughout their week? Zipcar has a couple of stats, that really sort of detail why people are using this service. 49% of the Zipcar trips are people just running errands, and these are errands that do not include their things like grocery shopping. These are errands. Maybe it's going to the doctor or going to places in the city that aren't easily accessible by public transit. Or it could be like your example, louis, of having to furnish a new apartment and not wanting to take a giant couch on the bus.
Speaker 1:Yeah, totally, and I can even think of like going to places like a Home Depot you want to buy you know you're working on a project in your backyard a garden center, buying a new grill or whatever it may be, picking up and dropping things off at your friend's house if you need to, you know need to borrow a cooler or whatever it may be. Um, it makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:Uh, after errands, the next I was going to say all of us probably have this mental image of seeing people in New York city on the subway carrying like tables across town, and probably anybody who's listening to those who lives in New York city has had an experience where they're trying to like pick up things and move them across town using public transit.
Speaker 1:so if you have one of those experiences, we'd love to actually have you comment and talk about it I just watched the tiktok, like yesterday, of these two guys carrying a couch through the subway, but the way they were doing it, like the couch was just like rubbing up against the ground and I was just like I don't know if I'd want to sit on that couch after it made that journey.
Speaker 1:I don't know, but after errands at 49% you also 47% of users do use the Zipcar to go to the grocery store Makes a lot of sense. You know, oftentimes you're going to the grocery store shopping for like the entire week. It's not like you're going in for one or two items, and you know, if you don't own a car, you're probably not necessarily shopping like that. You're probably having to do like lots of small trips carrying things. So to be able to knock out all your groceries especially if you can rent a car, for, you know, a pretty affordable amount to limit those trips, it can be helpful, although I would say, though, that I think, like you know, having more small grocery stores around can kind of help alleviate some of that, which I know is something that a lot of cities in the United States are trying to work on, and I think that that's probably the better solution than making it so that, oh, I'll just rent a car to go do this every time. But it makes a lot of sense that that is another high usage point.
Speaker 2:Kind of like the bodega culture in New York. You have your local bodega on the corner, you can go and pick up whatever supplies or groceries that you really need. But I think, where this comes into play for cities that are bigger, or cities sorry, bigger cities that aren't New York, like Boston, chicago and other places that don't really have that as readily available yeah, it makes total sense to take this for grocery shopping. Another big usage 41% of trips are people using zip cars to go out of their city. So you know, maybe the public transit doesn't go from one suburb to another or from one city to the other, so that's also a really good use case for it. And 39% of trips are also visiting family and friends and again, those may also be folks who are outside of your sort of immediate neighborhood or immediate city.
Speaker 1:Lastly, you've got 36% of these trips going towards appointments. And this one makes a lot of sense too when you think about it because, again, unfortunately, like outside of the major cities in the United States, a lot of the transit options are not the most reliable. You know, we always try to like point out some of the positives and in a lot of places you can get around fine. But I would say the vast majority of the times that I took transit when I was living in Austin was not when I needed to be somewhere at a specific time. If you have an appointment where it's like, hey, you need to be there at 1pm, to make sure you're definitely going to be there at 1pm, like you need to leave way earlier on the bus and like, sure, if everything's going smoothly you'll get there early, but like, if you have one canceled bus, one weird thing happened on the bus, some weird traffic accident, whatever it may be, you know you're gonna you're gonna be late, and if you can't be late, renting a Zipcar for an appointment makes some sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it makes sense. We also talk a lot about sort of that last mile of transit and where you have those gaps you can get generally close to where you need to go, but maybe there's a little bit more distance so you either have to walk or use a bike share or a scooter. In this case, this is also a potential use case. You have zip cars or some type of car sharing company that's sort of near transit centers. You can get in that car and you can take it to wherever you need to go to finish that last mile.
Speaker 2:But also, I think one of the important reasons why we should promote this in cities is that it does or does have the potential to reduce congestion in the cities because you know somebody who is taking that car out. They're not going to use it every single day, they're going to revert back public transit when they need to, but it just in general will create less demand for cars on the road or less. There's less cars on the road because they're not. You know everybody's not using their own personal vehicle. A couple of things there I think.
Speaker 1:I think like, yes, not's not using their own personal vehicle. A couple things there. I think I think like, yes, not everyone's using their own personal vehicle. Uh, you need less parking, because you know what I mean. Like, if you have a again to cite, their stat is uh, that was from that study there. Um, and I believe in that study.
Speaker 1:I looked a little bit further into it just to make sure it wasn't some bs study and it's not, it's, it's real. Um, but it's it's. It cites somewhere between nine and thirteen uh, cars being taken off the road, personal cars being taken off the road per zip car. Um, so the parking element to this is is huge, um, if you don't need as many surface parking lots everywhere, all that sort of stuff, um, and then the other kind of comparison you could make is like well, why do people need these car shares when they could just uber?
Speaker 1:Um, a couple of reasons. Number one if you're running multiple errands, uh, it's really annoying to like, oh, I need to go to the grocery store for one thing, and then I need to go to, uh, the post office, and then I need to go somewhere else, and now, all of a sudden, you're like schlepping the things from your first appointment spot into the Uber, out of the Uber to your next spot into the Uber, out of the Uber to the net, and like that's not really feasible, whereas the car share in this case you, you know you can leave your groceries in the car for a little bit when you run into the post office or to wherever you may be going. So that's the other comparison. And then the you know Uber or Lyft model also then has these cars driving around, just driving around around, waiting for their next ride, also on the road, which isn't very efficient, whether it's an autonomous I know right now all the autonomous vehicles are being brought back up into the conversation again, as Tesla just rolled out their robo taxis and whatnot but those cars are driving around empty sometimes, which contributes to traffic on the road. So, yeah, a a lot to think about.
Speaker 1:With this, we're gonna jump right back into this episode in just a second, but first, if you have not liked this video, go ahead and do so. Also, leave a comment. We love reading all of them and respond to as many as we can, and be sure that you are subscribed so that you catch every episode as they come out, please share this with your friends, and if you don't have time to watch YouTube videos in the future, you can catch us on any of the podcast platforms that are out there.
Speaker 2:Just be sure to leave us a rating and give us a comment. I had a little bit of experience with a similar system years ago. I mean, this was when I I was early in Austin. It would have been my first year in town. I was dating somebody who did not have a very reliable car, and we would, you know.
Speaker 1:I already know that this is not Brent.
Speaker 2:This is not Brent. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but we would go places around town and we'd occasionally use the bus. But whenever we had to go to do things like go to make a quick grocery store stop or something, we would use a service called Car2Go. And Car2Go was this pretty large fleet of smart cars and if you're familiar with smart cars, they're the little tiny like tiny, tiny little cars like little roller skates.
Speaker 1:Yep, those are probably pretty scary to ride around in an Austin, honestly, I mean it was.
Speaker 2:It was at first for sure. I was like looking up safety stats one day, like on the on the drive Right. It was definitely a little, a little scary Texas, you know giant big trucks everywhere but it was cool to be able to sign up for the service. They would give you a little card that you would use to like swipe at the door to get in and you would check out the car on the app. It would hold it for you, go to the car, swipe yourself in and then you were free to use the car throughout the day. What was interesting was, if you wanted to do this in the most cost-effective way, you could take the car, go to the grocery store and when you exit the vehicle you would like end your trip kind of like a a scooter, like you'd end your trip and then just hope the car was there when you came back in.
Speaker 1:Like probably 70% of the time it wasn't there when we would come back so, oh wow, so it was pretty popular then people were using it, yeah it was actually pretty popular.
Speaker 2:but, like that was, my biggest fear is we would take it somewhere and we wouldn't hold it and come back out and the car would be gone. Obviously, you could hold it for a longer time if you needed to, but it was a really cool system and we used it quite a bit getting around town.
Speaker 1:It's kind of a shame as we were talking about this. I feel like Austin could really benefit from having a system like this today. I know it's been a while since any of these systems. I think I remember correct me me if I'm wrong was there one that was doing this with teslas like a couple years ago?
Speaker 1:there may have been, but also zip car has existed in austin too true, but I I feel like it's not, and maybe it's on me for just like not looking into it, but I'm just thinking that there is a world where, like jerry and I, could have lived car free in austin if there was a zip car spot at the triangle.
Speaker 2:Now watch, I'm going to look it up and there's like a zip car spot at the triangle that exists and I've but I used to see there, I used to see little signs all over the place that was like zip, car parking only or car share parking, so that it used to be, uh, maybe more popular.
Speaker 1:Maybe I also just I'm not noticing it nowadays yeah and uh, as I've mentioned a couple times throughout, I mean the. The idea for the episode kind of came from the last couple of days as Jerry and I've been moving into our new place. Yeah, I mean, to buy furniture here without a car is to buy furniture anywhere without a car is tricky. But I'm learning that like having things shipped here is pretty slow and not free, which is kind of the opposite of the united states. I feel like you can buy anything with free shipping and have it delivered in like six hours or something stupid sometimes now, or like like waiting two days now is like a long time for shipping. I feel like in the us and uh, that is like the fastest I'm seeing anything be shipped here and it's like with an extra fee. So I wanted to try this. Uh, uh, tile auto. Um, unfortunately you needed an eu driver's license to be able to do it, so I had to go through and rent a like a van thing through uh enterprise, which was much more expensive than the tile auto trip would have been. But I was seeing those all over the place and it made it so that the move was possible, and even just renting the car for the day made it so that we could get some of the bigger pieces of furniture, like the couch that I'm sitting on. We basically made a trip to an Ikea 45 minutes away I just like they're generally not in the middle of town. You wouldn't want to be moving. With the amount of boxes we had and on track we wouldn't have been able to. We had to do like 10 trips to ikea, um, but so we did that and then, to contrast it, like the next day we didn't have the car anymore. We obviously still need more furniture. We're gonna need more furniture basically every day for the next month. I don't know we've got Um. We went to another store that's like accessible in town.
Speaker 1:I live only a block and a half away from one of the tram lines in town here, which is amazing to have that ability. Uh, not trying to rub it in, but um, it's a very, very nice little walk over and you can get on the tram during the week. It comes every 10 minutes and um, but anyway I took it down to uh, another like it's like a, it's called a resta, it's like a target, basically, um, but we loaded up on a whole bunch of stuff, including a rug, and what I'll say was nice is like, oh, it's obviously like bulky and awkward to move all that stuff, but the trams and the buses here tend to actually have like more space at in them for, uh, like kind of the area where you'd have for folks who might be in a wheelchair or a parent with a stroller. Um, those areas are bigger on a lot of the transit here so far is what I've seen so we were able to make it happen, but it's still a pain in the butt and you have to be able to be like young and, like you know, I was gonna say young and strong.
Speaker 1:I don't, but I don't think I'm that strong, but but young and like fit though to be able to carry all your stuff that long distance. So, um, you know, having the car share options makes it so that you know you could live car free, but when you do need it, um, you know you have that option to be able to make those trips. And I just think it's like it's something that needs to be looked into a lot more and something that kind of falls off the radar. I feel like I hadn't really thought much about it until this week.
Speaker 2:No, and it's a good. It's a good thing for a lot of people to know that the option exists. I think there are a lot of people who might be open to going car free or reducing a car, but they always go citing excuses like well, when I have to go buy furniture, if I have to go buy something bulky, or when I'm doing my grocery runs, like I need a larger vehicle and it's going to, and I don't want to use the bus or train to do that. If you have options like this and you live in a city, that it's that it works. You know. As long as people know that this exists, maybe maybe they look into it, maybe they do reduce that car ownership or they uh find ways to change their commuting patterns. So, yeah, it's a really cool service that's out there that really does support the communities and support our cities and reducing congestion and just sort of challenging people's ideas on how they commute and how they use the roads that exist, totally.
Speaker 1:So with that I mean, take a look. If you've been trying to go car light or you're already car light and you're trying to go car free, maybe explore Zipcar. I know that we keep mentioning Zipcar because at least in the US, that's kind of the one big one nationwide cities. So keep an eye out in different cities for competitors that are doing this same kind of thing and it might be a good step for you to be able to go car light, car free, um, and also like save money at the same time. Again, we haven't really touched on it on this episode, but we've talked about in the past like car ownership is expensive, like you're lucky if you're spending less than 500 a month on car ownership. It's more than I mean 500 a month. When you're lucky if you're spending less than $500 a month on car ownership, it's more than I mean $500 a month when you're talking car payment, insurance, all this sort of stuff, like you'd be lucky to have that. Now.
Speaker 1:And if you have a gas vehicle, the amount you're spending on fuel, yeah, yeah, maintenance all this sort of stuff and, like a car, sharing can save you a lot of money. Even if you have to spend $100 a month on it, $150 a month on it, in the long run you're very likely going to be saving money, so definitely worth checking out. Thank you all, though. So much for watching this week. Both of our setups at home will probably improve over time here. Well, chris is in the exact same spot.
Speaker 2:I know I'm all alone on the couch, I know, I know here.
Speaker 1:well, chris is in the exact same spot, but, uh, I know, I know, I know, um, I'm my, uh, I was going to record this in the my little office space, um, but it is just an empty room with a desk and a chair in it and the echo I mean, the echo in this room is still pretty bad, but the echo was so bad that I did not want to put you all through that because it would have just sounded terrible. So, uh, in the next couple weeks, I want to try to build out a nice little space to do this sort of thing, and so, um, we'll see. But, um, if you want to support the show though, uh, the best way to do so if you haven't liked the video or subscribed, please consider doing so. Um, if you have experience doing car share in your city elsewhere, if you've got thoughts on the topic, if you think we're wrong and that it's terrible for cities and it just is anything with cars is bad you can let us know.
Speaker 2:I'm sure there's some people out there who are in that mindset, like why are they doing this?
Speaker 1:there will definitely be complaints on this one for sure. If you want to support the show directly, the best ways to do so are via our Patreon or buy me a coffee with the links in the description. You can also check out our merch store, but without further ado. Thank you all so much for watching and enjoy the rest of your Transit. Tangents Tuesday.
Speaker 2:That was not on sync. That wasn't that bad. I felt like it was close to on sync. Fix it in post.