Unpaved

3. Carsharing is Caring

Mixed into the public parking lot adjacent from Brewing Market Coffee in Boulder is a red Prius with a multitude of owners. A decal on the driver’s door says: eGo CarShare. “Our goal is to reduce car ownership, and make communities more livable.” Sitting across from me is eGo’s director Karen Worminghaus. “That means getting people on bikes and buses first,” she says. “Cars are a last resort.”

Until 2009, the nonprofit organization, which provides its members a car for hours at a time, had little significant impact. With only nine cars and an outdated touchtone phone reservation system, their idea of carsharing in Boulder barely took. But then grant funds came in, and they rebranded. Now, with a fleet of 40 vehicles (trucks, sedans, etc.) and a mobile website, eGo CarShare boasts more than 2,400 members—each who carry a key fob (the size of a tiny putty knife) programmed with an authentication access code. When swiped against the fob reader on the windshield, the eGo vehicle unlocks. The reader also provides metrics like Vehicle Miles Traveled.

“Our data has shown that once people join carsharing,” explains Worminghaus, “they decrease they’re driving by 52 percent.” According to their surveys, the average household pays $8,000 in transportation annually, mostly from doing errands on a whim. eGo CarShare users, who are forced to chart their travels, picking up and dropping off cars within a time slot, spend less than $350 a year.

She notions to the 20-plus cars parked along of the coffee shop. “Each CarShare vehicle replaces about 15 privately owned cars,” she says. Given Boulder’s urban-growth boundaries, parking lots become a throwaway of “vital real estate.”

But eGo CarShare is one of many services spreading at a rapid rate. According to the Transportation Sustainability Research Center in Berkeley, Calif., carshare-vehicle ratios in the US were 64:1 as of July 2012—a 13.9 percent increase from the previous year. Other nearby services include ZipCar, Car2Go and Denver’s OccasionalCar.

The problem Worminghaus sees is that if carsharing is too readily available, people might use cars where taking a bus or B-Cycle would easily suffice. (Currently, eGo is in talks with RTD in creating a joint pass for multi-modal transportation.) It’s a future measured in a per mile basis. A future where preprogramming more organized and succinct commutes would be  better if taken out of human hands.