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MIT Offers City Car for the Masses
MIT's stackable electric car, a project to improve urban transportation will make its debut this week in Milan. "The City Car, a design project under way at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is envisioned as a two-seater electric vehicle powered by lithium-ion batteries. It would weigh between 1,000 and 1,200 pounds and could collapse, then stack like a shopping cart with six to eight fitting into a typical parking space. It isn't just a car, but is designed as a system of shared cars with kiosks at locations around a city or small community."
from the top of this page:
"but is designed as a system of shared cars with kiosks..."
nobody owns individual cars, you subscribe to the service and grab a car from a kiosk wherever you need one.
How long until there's grafiti everywhere, the seats are slashed, and the cars are rendered unusable by the public?
Not that this isn't a great idea. It's just depressing that people will purposefuly ruin things like this.
(Okay, so not exactly "Tragedy of the Commons")
And what's this I hear about a company called Zipcar offering hourly car rentals in cities all over the US? Ha! It'll never catch on. I'll bet those commies will find their shared cars being full of graffiti and ripped seats and radios ripped out for drug money.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
One thing this category of solution doesn't address is that people use their cars for transportation and temporary storage of...stuff. Boring stuff like an extra coat and an umbrella, work-related files or equipment, books, food/drink, maps, groceries, not to mention children.
Rented vehicles of any kind, or small vehicles meant to only carry people and not much else reduce the abilty to carry stuff around. Riding a bike while carrying a briefcase can be a challenge, let alone hauling a network switch or linux server from train to bus, bus to rented folding car, rented folding car to bike, bike to building. The plain fact about public or shared transit is that storage or transfer of even the most trivial item throughout the day becomes a nightmare.
It's easy to treat this as an irrelevant issue but it's a vital part of everyday life and urban planners need to stop ignoring it if they want to find solutions that people can actually live with.
1. You have access to a car anytime you want/need it, without the hassle and expense of owning a car. Could save a lot of money if you live close enough to work to walk or bike and only occasionally need a car.
2. Unlike trains, the "stations" could be at every corner, since all that would be needed is a few square feet and a card reader. Also, unlike trains, a station at every corner doesn't mean you have to stop at every corner all the way to your destination.
3. No unexpected huge repair bills -- maintenance and repairs are just part of the fee.
4. More space in your garage, since you don't have to own a car.
5. Parking is easy to find -- just go to a kiosk.
6. You don't have to pay for parking. Imagine driving one of these to the airport.
7. Drive into town, go out drinking, cab it back home without having to go back to retrieve your car the next day.
8. Any given car is in use a higher percentage of the time, so if everyone (or a large fraction of everyone) did this, we wouldn't have to devote nearly as much land to parking lots.
9. Need exercise? Walk to the grocery store, buy a cart full of groceries, drive back home. This also reduces gas usage/environmental impact by 50% compared to driving both ways.
10. Drive to work on a rainy morning. When the weather clears in the afternoon, walk back home.
11. If you get a flat tire, just call maintenance, then grab another car and keep going.
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?