Ithaca Carshare looks to provide an alternative to private vehicle ownership
By Rob Ochshorn
Fall 2006
If short on time in downtown Copenhagen, Denmark, a three-dollar
deposit is all it takes to hop on one of 2,000 municipally owned and
maintained “city bikes” before cruising down the city’s spacious bike
lanes. In downtown Ithaca, no such program exists and it’s grueling
even to think about pedaling up University Ave to class.
 The former Redbud Woods, now a parking lot (photo by Ian Tse)
Plans are, however, solidifying on an ambitious local
carsharing initiative, Ithaca Carshare, which could be rolled out to
Cornell and Ithaca College by August. Though implementation varies
greatly in each location it pops up, the concept behind a carsharing
program is simple: members pay a some combination of monthly, hourly,
and per-mile fees in exchange for access to a fleet of well-maintained
vehicles with gas, insurance, and sometimes other perks like parking
included in the price. Touted benefits of carsharing include
environmental considerations (carsharing causes a decline in private
vehicle ownership as well as a decline in total vehicle usage),
individual financial benefits (owning a car is more expensive than
commonly perceived), and increased mobility for those who don’t own a
vehicle.
Precursors to modern carsharing popped up around the world as early as
a 1948 program operating in a Zurich, Switzerland housing cooperative,
but the early car shares generally spanned the 70s and early 80s.
Examples of early carsharing efforts include: “Procotip” in
France, “Witkar” in the Netherlands, “Green Car” in Britain, “Vivalla
Bil” in Sweden, Mobility Enterprise run in Indiana by Purdue
University, and the Short Term Auto Rental Service in San Francisco.
According to a mammoth 250-page report on carsharing, Car-Sharing:
Where and How it Succeeds, put out by the Transportation Research Board
(TRB) with funding from the Federal Transit Administration, there were
wild differences between each of these programs, but “what each of
these programs did have in common is that almost all folded after a
short period of time, usually within a few years.”
Modern carsharing began with a solid technological infrastructure in
the late 80s in Switzerland and Germany and spread rapidly through
Europe, which according to the TRB report made up 75 percent of between
200,000 and 280,000 worldwide carshare members in 2005.
Carsharing comes to America
Two carshares started American operations in 1998: Dancing Rabbit, a
small-scale service based in a small cooperative community in Missouri,
and CarSharing Portland, which grew rapidly and set the stage for more
widespread American adoption of carsharing, which is now available in
over 20 American cities including Chicago, New York, Seattle,
Washington DC, and Los Angeles.
Several different models of operation have been successful in America.
Zipcar and Flexcar (which eventually bought the pioneering CarSharing
Portland) are the two largest for-profit carshares operating in
American cities, while tax-exempt nonprofits in California and
Philadelphia, and small, member-owned cooperatives provide other
functioning models.
Easy access to a well-maintained vehicle without worry about insurance,
gasoline, or oil checks is a tantalizing option. In fact, many who join
a carshare program discover that they actually do not need a car of
their own—or more commonly, that they do not need two cars of their
own. Over 30 studies on the effects of carsharing on vehicle ownership
have been conducted internationally, each with its own methodology, set
of assumptions, and many studying different environments. The TRB study
computed averages of all the different studies, in North America, an
average of five private vehicles were replaced by each shared car,
which in turn provided for 24 members. Twenty percent of respondents
gave up a vehicle, and 40 percent avoided purchasing one.
Even if carsharing didn’t reduce total driving time—it does, in fact—it
reduces the number of cars on the road and drastically reduces the
amount of time cars sit unused, parked. The significance of this last
point is subtle but important. UCLA Urban Planning professor Donald
Shoup reveals the dangers of our car parking status quo in his book The
High Cost of Free Parking. According to Shoup, the average car spends
95 percent of its lifetime parked. With three to four parking spaces
(e.g. home, work, Wegmans, mall) for every car in the United States,
that’s 700 to 900 million spaces, and the between $127 and $374 billion
spent nationally every year to subsidize off-street parking is up there
with the nation’s biggest expenses.
Parking at Cornell
Cornell also has a parking problem. David Lieb ‘89 MA ‘06, Chair of the
Ithaca Carshare Steering Committee and Communications Manager for
Cornell’s Transportation and Mail Services, describes parking at
Cornell in stark terms. When he started his transportation work for
Cornell in 1990, demand for parking spaces outstripped supply by 2,500
spots while the university’s total available surface space would cover
only an additional 1,300. The only way to meet demand would have been
multi-level parking structures, “millions and millions of dollars that
could be well spent on the academic and research needs of the
university,” according to Lieb.
And even if Cornell had the space, the cost of constructing,
maintaining, and financing parking lots—Lieb puts it at around $1,000 a
year for each spot—dwarfs even the costliest parking permits and forces
heavy subsidizing by the university. There are substantial incentives
for faculty to decline parking permits or to form carpool groups (in
certain lots, the university will pay you and provide a reserved spot
if you carpool in sufficient numbers).
The university’s parking shortage escalated to a prolonged and bitter
stand-off between the university, which wanted to construct a 176-spot
parking lot as part of the West Campus Initiative, and protesters
lambasting then-president Jeffrey Lehman ‘77 for his apparently hollow
commitment to sustainable development. Eventually, the university
appeased most of the protesters with eight concessions including free
bus passes for new students not requesting a parking permit.
What about a carshare?
A less visible product of the Redbud protests was the creation of the
Ad Hoc Faculty Committee on Environmental Sustainability and
Transportation and Parking Needs (later termed the Sustainable
Transportation Committee, or simply SusTrans), which was given $50,000
to investigate alternative transportation systems.
On this committee representing graduate students was Daniel Roth, who
is studying Participatory Community Development in the Education
Department. Roth, living in the environmentally-friendly EcoVillage at
Ithaca had been intrigued by an informal carshare there involving three
cars and over a dozen semi-regular users. He applied for a grants and
helped coordinate research on carshares, including a business plan made
for the class of Ithaca College Professor Granger Macy, whose interest
was sufficiently piqued that he currently serves on the Ithaca Carshare
Steering Committee.
While serving on the Ad Hoc committee, Roth began organizing a January
2006 summit with speakers from other carshares to speak and answer
questions. “I reached out to people at IC, Cornell, the City of Ithaca,
local transportation planners, students, grassroots coalitions and
EcoVillage to join a planning committee for the summit,” Roth
explained, “Most of the people on the Steering Committee were involved.”
Roth worked on getting the summit together and getting the right people
to participate, and he provided a framework for getting the program off
the ground. He was not the first to suggest carsharing for Ithaca—Roth
says that the for-profits Zipcar and Flexcar both discussed providing
carsharing to Cornell, neither being interested in providing carsharing
for the rest of Ithaca—but his ability to bring together so many
different segments of the community each with their own interests has
given substantial momentum to the program.
Jennifer Dotson, coming to the Steering Committee from the Curb Your
Car Coalition, explained carsharing as being “the missing piece of the
puzzle” for efficient transportation. Many in Ithaca can get to work
without driving, but there’s that pesky doctor’s appointment in the
middle of the day that requires easy access to a vehicle. Since all the
cars for the carshare will in be located centrally, other means of
transportation may be necessary to get to a car and all alternatives to
private vehicle travel thrive in locations with a car share.
Getting ready to go
Arriving early at a Steering Committee meeting in mid-October, I found
the group huddling in excitement around color printouts of schemes for
the new Ithaca Carshare logo. The colorful tilings of bring green cars
brought out smiles from everyone until it was suggested that having one
of the cars upside down could suggest an unfortunate accident. The
committee went over draft by-laws—contented enough with content to be
quibbling over the serial comma—and discussed their non-profit
incorporation, before discussing a rate structure and financial
projections.
“Putting together this Steering Committee has been really funny,”
Dotson explained. Trying to get around town for midday meetings,
“everyone’s been saying ‘I wish I had a carshare!’”
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