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Since I posted this on the original story, and it seems fitting to repost here, I'm going to. If the editors can dupe stories, I might as well dupe comments (oh, I can feel my karma going up in flames for this already).

I lived in Portland for quite a few years, and saw the benefits of Flexcar. It's such a pedestrian/mass transit friendly city (as long as you're in Portland proper, and not out in Tigard or Lake NoNegro or any of the other wretched suburbs), and at least in the areas I lived in many people chose not to own a car because they simply didn't need one. That, or they prefered to walk, bike, or take the bus/light rail. Flexcar gave a few people I knew the option to pick up a car and use it on the rare occassion they needed one.

I never made use of one - I had a car of my own there for quite some time, and after I got rid of it I had my girlfriend's car to drive around on the rare occassion I needed to. That said, for quite some time I lived near one of the designated parking areas for them (in front of the substation on Belmont around 30th for anyone who knows the area). I walked past one at least once or twice a week on the way to the store, rode with someone in one, and from what I saw they always seemed to be in very nice condition. No graffiti, no damage at all to speak of.

Lots of people may be worthless douchebags who ruin good things for everyone else - but usually those people aren't the ones who are willing to put down a credit card to be able to do it.

I lived in Portland for quite a few years, and saw the benefits of Flexcar. It's such a pedestrian/mass transit friendly city (as long as you're in Portland proper, and not out in Tigard or Lake NoNegro or any of the other wretched suburbs), and at least in the areas I lived in many people chose not to own a car because they simply didn't need one. That, or they prefered to walk, bike, or take the bus/light rail. Flexcar gave a few people I knew the option to pick up a car and use it on the rare occassion they needed one.

I never made use of one - I had a car of my own there for quite some time, and after I got rid of it I had my girlfriend's car to drive around on the rare occassion I needed to. That said, for quite some time I lived near one of the designated parking areas for them (in front of the substation on Belmont around 30th for anyone who knows the area). I walked past one at least once or twice a week on the way to the store, rode with someone in one, and from what I saw they always seemed to be in very nice condition. No graffiti, no damage at all to speak of.

Lots of people may be worthless douchebags who ruin good things for everyone else - but usually those people aren't the ones who are willing to put down a credit card to be able to do it.

Yes, the yellow bikes program is a failure. Theft is rampant. I witnessed it in Atlanta with Decatur yellow bikes. It doesn't mean that every public transportation rental system will be a failure. We can learn from our mistakes. One needs only look to the successful Velib' bike rentals recently rolled out in Paris.

Under the Velib' system, anyone renting a bike must use a bank card which will lock 150 Euros in their account, as insurance on the bike. If it is stolen, and you report it to the police, the percentage of that you pay is substantially less. The program works great, and even now more Velib' stations are being added throughout the city. I think the system MIT proposes sounds more similar to this than the yellow bikes program.

As another poster mentioned, Flexcar is very successful as well.

Tone the cynicism down. Shared car companies already exist. It works pretty well and they make a profit.

http://www.flexcar.com/

but, how do you get by on no private cars as you seem to wish for?

In Seattle, WA they have something called Flexcar -- which (I'm a little shy on the details, I don't live in Seattle proper) is basically a quick per-hour car (or truck) rental for doing those sorts of things that you would need a car for while allowing you to use Metro Transit for everything else.

IIRC, the rental rates include gas and insurance and whatnot, so the idea is you don't have any of the expenses that regular car ownership has... and you can rent based on what you need at the time. If you only need a car for a couple hours each week (say 8 hours a month), the $8/hr or so rental fee is far cheaper than ~$100/mo+ on insurance + oil changes, maintenance, gas, etc.

"They need to be about as cheap as shopping carts - and even designed to fold up like shopping carts, so they can be racked conveniently in a compact space."

Dude, if you have to be unrealistic in your ideas, go all the way to personal transporters: "Beam me to work Scotty!"

If you want to see a realistic implementation of your idea (minus the folding cars -- forget rentals, if those were possible, they'd be in every household in Japan), look at http://flexcar.com/ -- the weakness is that you have to return to your origin, so that it is not appropriate for commuting or going to the airport.

Anyway, robots are fine drivers if you take the variability out of the system. Presumably, that's why these are on rails, to simplify the system to the point where they can navigate without too much risk of disturbance.

You must mean Flexcar.

isn't this identical to the flexcar service http://www.flexcar.com/ which has been operating in major cities since 1999.

There's also http://www.flexcar.com/

"Welcome to a new era in personal transportation. It's called carsharing. You share access to hundreds of Flexcar vehicles, often within a five-minute walk of your home or work. You reserve a car online or by phone, you drive - to a meeting, to run errands, or to hit the lumber yard - and you return, all for one hourly rate that covers gas, insurance and unlimited miles. All you pay for is the drive. How simple and smart is that? Plus, Flexcar is convenient, affordable, reliable, and great for the planet."

[...] but all this does is shift the pollution elsewhere.

Yes, it shifts it from being in every car on the road, to power plants, where it's far easier to prevent it from being poured into the atmosphere. That's a very good shift to make.

Not to mention not being very practical at all.

Er, how so? That really depends on what you need to do with it, no?

I can imagine lots of people saying that FlexCar is "not very practical at all", as well (for much the same reasons -- range?), and yet many people use that as their primary car.

I know it looks impressive in the commercials, but most of us don't need to drive up the side of a mountain every day. If you want to cut pollution, start by using an appropriate-sized vehicle; hauling around all that extra metal that makes up the Yukon XL is *not* helping your fuel economy, no matter what drive system you use.

Could there be a reason that gasoline is the energy storage mechanism of choice for vehicles?

Yes, it's the easiest to manufacture and distribute. Do you seriously think Henry Ford tried (picks random items from list) "dry ice sublimation" and "liquid N2", and rejected them because of their *energy density*?

[[ rant about how monster trucks are better than small cars ]]

Gee, I always thought the monster SUVs were the ugly ones. Lots of cars have 100% better mileage than those monster SUVs, even using plain ol' gasoline -- puts that 40% improvement to shame.

Covering the rear wheels does look ugly, but it's not mandatory -- lots of electric cars don't do that (the incredibly cute Selectria Force comes to mind). Many car manufacturers, especially the big-3 in Detroit, have a rather poor design sense. This is not the fault of electricity.

I see easily 3 FlexCar hybrids on my westside walk from the lightrail to my classes at PSU. Speaking of each, PSU faculty have specially reserved to them *10* FlexCar vehicles, and they only have the pay the yearly $35 dollar fee. The hard-to-park lucrative OHSU campus has 3 FlexCar vehicles reserved to staff and students there, too.

If I do ever sign up for FlexCar, I'm going to try my best to reserve the Mazda Miata. I've seen that beast twice now around town.
http://www.flexcar.com/company/photos/photo_10.jpg

First, it's scaling pretty well already. Second, if you find that Comic Book Guy did God Knows What in the back seat, you call the 24-hour number. They fine Comic Book Guy $200, pay you $20 for your inconvenience. Then they get you a taxi to another car, or you use the taxi itself for your trip. Which Comic Book Guy also pays for.

Go read the site at flexcar, it's pretty well thought-out.

-Zipwow

I realize it's hard to fathom, but the company I work for has hitched their wagon to the star that is IE. There are OCXs all over the place. And we can't be the only ones. Just the other day I went to reserve Flexcar and was told that FireFox is an "Incompatible Browser."

The good news? It keeps me in a job. Because I'm constantly removing spyware, popups, and browser hijacks! If we switched to Mozilla, I'd probably be downsized. Though any savings from that would surely be offset by the need to hire a bunch more web developers to make a site that works without all these OCX controls.

The jury is still out about whether this business model can be profitable in the long run, but Zipcar and Flexcar are selling easy access to loaner cars for people who only need wheels a few times a month.

Right now, they're not offering large vehicles to owners of small vehicles. They're offering small vehicles to people who primarily use public transportation -- or to single-car families who occasionally need a second vehicle. But if they succeed, it makes sense that they would branch out into a wider variety of vehicle sizes.

Do you mean something like flexcar?

try flexcar

I would prefer a future where sprawl is ended. Reasonable sized personal transport is king for short distances. Public transit is used for long distances. And I can spend less tax $$ on the infrastrucure for cars, less of my personal income on cars and less time killing people for oil. (you pro-bush yankees listening..?)

I think that the future of transportation may be in a spoke and hub format similar to how the airlines currently work (though with many more hubs). Imagine high-speed rail running between metropolitan (and geographically strategic rural) areas with a network of local-use transportation options(ala, the Flexcar system, or even light-rail and buses).

The problem, of course, is that too many of us yankees are obsessed with the idea of MY car. That is, arguably, due to a long pattern of marketing, so is probably changable. Not in the near-term, however.

flexcar does the same thing in different markets than zipcar, and predates zipcar (barely).