In Business, Creating Sustainable Enterprises & Communities

HOURCAR PUTS GREEN SLANT ON CAR SHARING

In Business, September-October, Vol. 29, No. 5, p. 10

Twin Cities environmentally centered nonprofit brings car sharing to town as part of its mission to provide tools for energy efficient living.

Mary Morse

SHARING CARS is not a new idea. Families, businesses, and even neighbors and friends have shared the use of personal or fleet vehicles for as long as cars have been on the road. Consider the common scenarios of a couple with teenagers placing dibs on the family car at breakfast, or an employee haunting the department receptionist's desk to enter a reservation in the dog-eared company fleet notebook.
When it comes to cars and trucks, people have all kinds of reasons to share. Motor vehicles are expensive, they require ongoing attention, and they take up quite a lot of space in our yards and communities. Plus, most of us only actively drive our cars, trucks, or SUVs for a couple of hours every day. The balance of time finds our vehicles parked. Since the American Automobile Association (AAA) claims that it costs $7,800 per year, on average, to own and operate a car that gets 15,000 miles of use, it goes without saying that minimizing one's investment in a vehicle is a sound financial strategy. Sharing cars is a great way to have the convenience of a private vehicle when needed, with none of the attendant hassles and inefficiencies.
Once relegated to informal arrangements among small groups, the logistics of sharing cars among a large group of drivers took a big step toward practicality with the advent of the Internet. Now, people can use shared cars on demand by making reservations online or by telephone. Owned by a central operator, modern shared cars are outfitted with keycard or fob sensors and are linked to the Web. The keycard or fob ensures that only authorized drivers are able to enter and use the cars. Cars are picked up and returned to the same location. Drivers' individual use of the cars is tracked by onboard computers and associated software. Billing shows time and mileage used by the drivers each month.
The implications of these technological advances, and the potential reach of formal car-sharing arrangements, are too new to be fully understood. How might our transportation habits change if shared vehicles sprouted up in every densely populated neighborhood - or even in suburban cul-de-sacs or park-and-ride lots? Would more drivers consider their options, take account of costs, and decide that commuting to school or to work on the bus, the subway, or in a carpool is a smart move? Will recalcitrant car owners determine that going to the movies by bike, walking to buy a cup of coffee, and reserving a shared car for a big grocery haul are lifestyle choices that makes sense?

BRINGING CAR SHARING TO TOWN
A small nonprofit in the Twin Cities of Saint Paul and Minneapolis saw an opportunity to fulfill its mission by bringing car sharing to town. The Neighborhood Energy Connection (NEC) works to reduce pollution and conserve resources by providing, according to its mission, “tools for energy-efficient living.”
The NEC was driven into the car-sharing world in 2002 by a group of interested citizens, who, along with Philipp Muessig, a representative of the Minnesota Office of Environmental Assistance (OEA, now part of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency), were shopping the car-sharing concept around to potential implementers. At the same time, the NEC was undergoing an organizational metamorphosis and was seeking new program ideas. Several meetings between the citizen group and the NEC Executive Director led to a proposal to the NEC Board, which gave provisional support to the car-sharing project, named HOURCAR.
With business planning grants from the OEA and the city of Minneapolis, and valuable technical assistance from San Francisco's nonprofit City CarShare, the NEC laid the groundwork for HOURCAR. The program launched in June, 2005 with an all-hybrid fleet.
We knew we were taking a chance with HOURCAR. Car sharing was growing quickly in other cities, but the Twin Cities don't have the population density found on the East and West Coasts. We also had the barriers of an underdeveloped transit system, and very high levels of car ownership per capita. But it was clear that if we didn't bring car sharing to the Twin Cities, it might be years before one of the big companies would come here. We also worried that if the national firms ever arrived, their business models might be more profit-centered than environmentally defensible. HOURCAR moved forward and developed an environmentally-focused car-sharing model that bucked some trends in the industry.
Although the Swiss were the first to develop car-sharing businesses in 1987, the phenomenon spread rapidly throughout Europe. Car sharing jumped the Atlantic in 1994, when a car-sharing company was founded in Quebec, Canada. The first U.S. car-sharing service launched in 1998 as the public-private precursor to what is now Flexcar in Portland, Oregon; followed in quick succession by several small car-sharing organizations (CSOs). In 2000, Zipcar launched as a for-profit company in Boston. Large corporate CSOs such as Flexcar and Zipcar have attracted major private investment, and have placed hundreds of shared vehicles in New York, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Washington D.C., and elsewhere (even overseas, with Zipcar's recent London launch). Today, 18 U.S. car-sharing programs claim 134,094 members sharing 3,637 vehicles.
Battling successfully for turf with the large commercial CSOs are a number of nonprofits. City CarShare in San Francisco, and PhillyCarShare in Philadelphia are among the largest and most successful nonprofit CSOs. Nonprofit groups see a distinct reason to enter the car-sharing world.

FROM CAR CHOICES TO HUB LOCATIONS
“As a nonprofit program, HOURCAR can stay true to its goal of providing a community service, from car choices, to pricing, to hub location,” says NEC Board member and HOURCAR founder David Van Hattum, program manager with the Minnesota advocacy group, Transit for Livable Communities.
“HOURCAR can make operational decisions that aren't necessarily championed in a commercial setting. For instance, when we were looking at choosing fleet vehicles, it became obvious to us that we needed to pick very fuel-
efficient and low-emissions models, even if that choice, because of its higher cost, meant that we would have a smaller fleet.”
Despite the higher up-front costs, those green business decisions appear to be paying off. In its most recent member survey, HOURCAR learned that 72 percent of its members were influenced to join HOURCAR because of its environmental benefits.
Going yet greener, HOURCAR was the first CSO in the world to convert one of its hybrid vehicles into a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV). “Pluggie,” as the HOURCAR PHEV is affectionately known, has become a beloved part of the HOURCAR fleet. The car was converted by Hymotion Company of Toronto, and sports a lithium-ion battery pack tucked seamlessly into the trunk space. Pluggie's hub (“hub” is HOURCAR's language for parking location) is at the Mississippi Market Natural Foods Cooperative in Saint Paul, which provides the parking space, an outdoor electrical outlet, and payment for the car's utility bill, estimated to be about 50 cents per day. The car routinely garners 75 or more miles per gallon by drawing on its secondary battery for the first 30-odd miles of each fully-charged trip.
HOURCAR has even proposed to partner with a solar developer to build six new grid-connected solar electric arrays and site six new hubs, featuring shared electric cars. As the electric car marketplace advances, with new, high-speed integrated-plug-in vehicles supplanting the need for gasoline-electric hybrids, HOURCAR will be watching. Imagine the environmental benefits if we could help a community build photovoltaic systems and add electric cars to the HOURCAR fleet. The resulting drop in auto-related carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and particulate emissions would be astounding. And there'd be no problems with nuclear waste or ecological disruption from hydroelectric generation - the cars would run completely on energy from the sun.
There is no known ceiling for public participation in car sharing. The ultimate size of the car-sharing market will be determined by factors such as regional settlement patterns, home mortgage rates, the resurgence (or lack thereof) in the popularity of urban living, parking scarcity, and transit development. At its current size of 16 cars parked at 15 hubs, HOURCAR's membership is growing steadily, but the program has not yet reached self-sufficiency.
According to HOURCAR Program Manager Joe Zimsen, HOURCAR is at a fascinating - but challenging - point in its development. “We need to balance our relatively small fleet size with a baseline level of staffing and marketing,” says Zimsen, “and we're seeking to optimize use of the current fleet before adding cars. Yet we hear from neighborhoods all the time that they want an HOURCAR hub, and a primary mission directive is to grow to serve the maximum number of potential members, as quickly as we can.”
A benefit of its community-based status is HOURCAR's openness and attractiveness to partnerships with outside entities. Two private colleges (Macalester and Augsburg) and one housing developer (Schafer Richardson) have subsidized new cars and hubs. Other local businesses provide reduced-price or free parking spaces. Some even promote their HOURCAR to customers and to the public as a community investment. “HOURCAR is a community-supported program, and we get tremendous value from our partners, whether they are our members, our hub sponsors, or volunteers on the HOURCAR Advisory Committee,” says Van Hattum.
While looking forward to the approach of HOURCAR's financial success, we welcome the spread of additional car-sharing networks of all sizes. As gasoline becomes more expensive, and as our environmental responsibilities in the face of global warming are taken more seriously, car-sharing is going to become an increasingly important, affordable transportation strategy for drivers worldwide. The more shared cars, the merrier.

Mary Morse is Executive Director of the Neighborhood Energy Connection located in St. Paul, Minnesota. She can be e-mailed at marym@thenec.org. The “Tools for Energy Efficient Living” can be visited at www.thenec.org.