Time-share condos. Time-share boats. Time-share cars.
Time-share cars?
If there’s anything that seems alien to the nation’s culture, sharing a car might be it.
But listen to Conrad Wagner, a Swiss businessman sounding out Seattle transportation officials on the idea. Wagner has been running car-sharing operations in Europe since 1988. In Switzerland, Wagner’s company, Car Sharing Switzerland, has more than 16,000 people signed up to use 1,000 cars in a car-share fleet, from 800 locations.
Total European operations involve 40,000 members, using 3,000 cars at 700 more locations.
“When you need a hotel room, you don’t buy a hotel,” Wagner said.
The state Department of Transportation’s Office of Urban Mobility invited Wagner to Seattle after a department official heard about car-sharing at a transportation conference in Spokane, Wash.
Wagner met with state, county and regional transportation officials in November to discuss doing a feasibility study.
Car-sharing works by having an organization buy, maintain, insure and operate vehicles. You might use a time-share vehicle for a few minutes or hours.
In Europe, cars are scheduled through reservation systems. The cars usually are within three blocks of a customer’s home. A safe at the car-share site contains the keys and is accessible with a car-share key or magnetic card.
Costs are paid through an initial fee, a monthly fee and a mileage charge, with the user billed only for miles driven. For a feasibility study done in Portland last summer, the initial fee was estimated at $500, monthly fees at $20 and mileage charge at 20 cents a mile. Thus, the annual costs for driving a 1996 Ford Escort 10,000 miles were estimated at $3,310 for car-sharing versus $4,380 for ownership.
A number of factors, such as traffic jams and parking shortages, might make this the time to try something new, Wagner says. That doesn’t even measure money, with the estimated cost of running a new mid-size car at $4,400 to $8,500 a year.
Wagner believes social concepts have life cycles, and the life cycle of individual car ownership may be nearing an end.
That step is going to be toward what he calls “mobility providers,” in which the issue is not ownership but getting around more efficiently.
A significant benefit could be reducing the number of cars on the roads.
Wagner has learned to cope with dozens of issues involved in making car-sharing work, from keeping the cars clean to changing the oil, and sees the major challenges as those involving human nature.
“It has to be some kind of organized system, and it has to be anonymous,” he said. “You don’t want to have to talk to your neighbor to use the car.”
The Portland study, conducted for the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, found that 11.7 percent of drivers older than 21 would be likely to join a car-sharing club in their neighborhood.
