Slashdot Mirror

>

If I had space to park two cars at my house, I'd have an electric one as a regular vehicle, but with certain transportation needs, I'm not able to find them in an electric vehicle yet and I can't afford the conversion costs.

If you live in a city, one option to having 2 cars might be to join a city car share program. If you rarely need the range of a gas powered engine, it could be a cost effective alternative to owning two cars. Plus you can choose the car that best meets your needs - take a sporty convertible for a weekend getaway with your wife, take a minivan on the long trip with the kids, take a pickup truck to the hardware store, etc.

http://www.zipcar.com/
http://www.citycarshare.org/

Check out City CarShare. Rental vehicles stored in parking spots all over the city, available in timeslots as small as half an hour for only $4/hr peak, $2/hr off peak, plus $.44/mile which includes gas and comprehensive insurance. This is the way of the future. Bicycles, trains, or slidewalks(!) for normal people, rent a car for a few bucks the hour you need it each day, a truck for a little more on the day you need it each month.

Don't leave out City Car Share for San Francisco. There is something of a schism in the car sharing world between the non-profits (like City Car Share) and the for-profits (like Zipcar and Flexcar). The non-profits say their model is superior, in part because it is easier to ink deals for parking spots and make deals with public agencies. The for-profits say the important thing is attracting capital to the market so services can grow.

See Why Non-Profit at City Car Share for a good summary of the non-profit side.

Don't leave out City Car Share for San Francisco. There is something of a schism in the car sharing world between the non-profits (like City Car Share) and the for-profits (like Zipcar and Flexcar). The non-profits say their model is superior, in part because it is easier to ink deals for parking spots and make deals with public agencies. The for-profits say the important thing is attracting capital to the market so services can grow.

See Why Non-Profit at City Car Share for a good summary of the non-profit side.

Without Flexcar, she would have had to meet the expense of keeping the car around for those odd occasions...

There must be millions of people who own and use cars for just that reason, and it has a pretty nasty environmental and economic impact. Which is the main motivation behind the organization that does car sharing in my area.

Then again, there are millions of people who wouldn't give up their cars for any reason. Are these the folks who complain most loudly about gas prices?

Show me one part of Chicago's El that doesn't look like complete crap. San Francisco is busy tearing down the last remnants of its blighted elevated freeway, and property values are shooting up for buildings now seeing the sun for the first time in decades.

Of course San Francisco also has public personal transporters that use these new-fangled "road" and "car" technologies too. Wonder if it'll catch on.

• $3,782 in depreciation
• $1,603 in insurance
• $975 in fuel
• $915 in maintenance
• $741 in finance costs
• $415 in other costs

Just in case you were serious about your desire for a sub $300 car rental service where you trade cars, check out City Car Share. They're local to San Francisco, and they're not a flat fee, but they're a hell of a lot less than $300/month. $10/month + $3.50/hour when you actually have a car. And $.37/mile. It's a great deal if you really need a car about once or twice a month.

Well, that's a _good_ thing. A higher population spread will spread the pollution. In a country like Canada where about 5% of the land makes something like 95% of the pollution, this is exactly what's needed. We could be cleaner than Japan if everyone spread out.

At the cost of vast ecosystem destruction and large increases in resource consumption. Every envirogeek I know feels that if people are going to pollute, they should do it in cities, where at least the damage is contained.

And note that Japan, noted for its cleanness, is very dense. They learned how to be clean because of the density. Perhaps we could learn from that.

So, what's your solution in this case, where mass transit is a no go?

Mass transit is a no-go because people made decisions that caused it to end up that way. The question is whether to notice the problem and move to correct it or to continue to use government money to subsidize more bad decisions. There is no easy solution, but some solutions pay off in the long term as well as the short.

Personally, I make sure to live near where I work, and I moved to an urban center that invests in public transport. These days I don't even own a car; I just check them out when I need them. Compared to the typical commuter, I save a lot of time and money, and consume far less of our shared environmental resources than most.

In the long term, we need to charge people properly for the use of shared resources. Road pricing, pollution taxes, and carbon taxes would help the problem a lot. If you give people something for free, they'll just run it into the ground. Thus, your 20 minute wait in traffic and your asthma deaths. The full change we need will take decades, of course, but that's no excuse for not starting now.

In the San Francisco area there's a similar outfit called City CarShare, although if I recall correctly, ZipCar is a for-profit concern; City CarShare is a nonprofit.

I've been a member for a year or so, and I love it. On the rare occasions I need a car, I reserve one via the web and walk a couple of blocks to pick it up. Every month they send me a bill. I don't have to worry about insurance, repairs, parking tickets, breakins, or any of the other car owner headaches. They even take care of gas; when the car is running low, there's a fleet card in the glovebox that lets you fuel up almost anywhere.

The drawbacks are pretty minor: If I need a car on a weekend day, I have to reserve a few days in advance. And the rates are such that if I'm going more than about 30 miles away, I'm better off just getting a car from Enterprise.

But overall, it's great! Since I live in an urban area, I just don't need a car very often, and so I end up saving a lot of money by just getting one for the few hours a month I actually use one.

While I can't speak for City Car Share, here at Zipcar we park cars in reserved spaces all around the metro area -- right now we're in Boston, DC, and NYC; you reserve online by the hour, and enter/exit the cars with an access card. When you're done, you park the car back in it's home (generally 5 mins. from your home), and the car sends back your milage for us to bill you. It's very painless, and a great alterative to car ownership, especially in cities where that ownership can run into the tens of thousands per year.

These do not go so far as to remove incentive to actually purchase though. In the case of the library, or borrowing it from your friend, the item is being treated in a similar way to physical property -- the lender is temporarily without the work.

On the contrary, they often do. There are innumerable books I haven't purchased because they were available at the library. Back when I had a TV, the same applied to checking out videos.

So it doesn't undermine copyright economics any more than borrowing your friends car or renting a car hurts the car market. As for radio play, the radio stations are supposed to compensate the copyright holders.

Both bad analogies. As to the first, I belong to an outfit called City CarShare, which lets me check out a car when I need one. Their studies show that this substantially reduces the purchase of cars. And for the second, one of the major scandals right now is the massive amounts that large music corporations play to buy air time.

But your notion raises an interesting question: If Film88 has one copy for each simultaneous viewing, just like a rental store, then would you view it as perfectly legal? And if that were so, how would you feel about the industry attempts to shut down Movie88 just because it threatens their current iron grip on the distribution channels?

Let's get this straight -- illegaly copying is not "civil disobedience", it is hypocrisy.

No, hypocricy is behaving contrary to your beliefs. Illegal copying is only hypocrisy if they believe they should pay, but don't. That's not true of all of the people involved.

I'm not denying that there are a lot of pathetic freeloaders who are just boosting the music and then spouting the opinion that lets them get the most free stuff. What I'm saying is that just because some of the people spouting those beliefs are parasitic dorks doesn't mean they all are, or that the beliefs are necessarily wrong.

Setting the amoral cheapskates aside, there are a few good reasons to use P2P file sharing. One is to perform the same sort of sharing that happens in the real world. Indeed, I've been considering extending Lincoln Stein's lovely Apache::MP3 module to have explicit checkin/checkout features, just like a library. Another is to use it like a more flexible form of radio, listening to stuff to find out what you would like to buy. Note that the big music companies pay for air time precisely because they believe that it increases sales.

A third is more complex: Suppose you believe that a) the big record companies form a large, price-fixing cartel, b) that their ability to buy whatever laws they like subverts the process of democracy, and c) that the profits of the record companies have damned little to do with the compensation of the creatives that copyright law is supposed to help. If so, it's plausible to conclude that the only way to force the necessary changes to copyright law is to undermine the record company's current revenue model enough to weaken them and bring them to the negotiating table.

As I said, I haven't concluded this yet; I paid for all the music I have. But I do buy most of my stuff from small record companies and independent record stores. It would be nice to think that the media conglomerates would look within and discover a sense of public responsibility, or at least a little enlightened self-interest. But it may take millions of people saying "Hey RIAA! Blow me!" to get copyright law to reflect the realities of the digital age.