Moving Beyond the Automobile

I'm discovering an untapped resource for all things nerdy and dear to my heart :)

The folks at Streetsblog, through their film organ, Streetfilms, have been releasing films for years that get to the core of many of our most pressing urban problems in a fun and visually stimulating way.

Many of their subjects are ones I've already tackled here at Green My Fleet, like car-sharing, bike-sharing, electric cars, congestion pricing, walkability, and public transit. Others are more far-reaching and poignant than I could possibly get on this blog.

My favorite part about their new series, Moving Beyond the Automobile, is their roundtable of celebrity (kind of :p) panelists who talk about the steps they are taking to move their cities in a progressive, less car-dependent direction.

Here's their promo:

Today is an exciting day here at Streetfilms as we are officially announcing the debut of our 10-part series "Moving Beyond the Automobile" (MBA).  Each Tuesday over the next ten weeks, tune in to Streetfilms as we'll be posting a new chapter about smart and proven strategies to reduce traffic and improve street safety for all users. 

We'll be tackling many fascinating topics in the next few months from "Bus Rapid Transit" to "Congestion Pricing" to "Car Share" to show how each can help people to use cars less - or not at all. 

We've been out talking to the experts.  Well-respected voices like former Bogotá mayor Enrique Peñalosa, Tri-state Transportation's Kate Slevin, Commissioner of NYC Department of Transportation Janette Sadik-Khan, Portland's Mayor Sam Adams, former 4-term Mayor of Milwaukee, and President of the Congress for New Urbanism John Norquist and dozens of other transportation authorities across the country to get their input and advice. 

At about the halfway point of the series, we'll also be posting a MBA curriculum that includes lessons and discussion points for each of these fun and important films. Streetfilms would like to thank The Fund for the Environment & Urban Life for making this series possible.

MBA_Trailer from Streetfilms on Vimeo.


If you have a spare moment, I'd definitely encourage to check out their weekly web series, starting every Tuesday on February 15th!

Paris Starts All-Electric Car Sharing Service

We've all heard of Paris' famous bike-sharing program, Velib. It has become a model for many other citiesaround the world rolling out their bike share systems. With low-cost stations, mobile and credit-card payment systems, and a cost per bike of around $1,000, bike share systems seem relatively simple to run and maintain.

But what about a similar service that rented out electric cars in the same way? Like an all-electric, omnipresent version of Zipcar? Now we're talking about a bit more overhead.

Paris is about to launch the world's first all-electric car-sharing service with publicly accessible stations, called Autolib, modeled just like its successful Velib bike-share system. The program could be operational as soon as September of this year! More details from Inhabitat:

Here’s how it will work: cars will be stored both in parking garages and on the street as part of a public-private partnership between Autolib and the city of Paris. No word yet on how much the program will cost, but Autolib claims that it will be significantly lower than the approximately $7,000 per year that it costs to own a car in the city.

It should be interesting to see how Paris deals with the problem of theft, which has notoriously plagued the Velib bike-share system. An estimated 80% of the initial 8,000 bikes (valued at $3,500 each) were either stolen or damaged in the year 2009, according to The New York Times. Parisians are also known for lighting cars on fire when they get angsty, as well. Perhaps dousing the Autolib cars with flame-retardant finish would do the trick?

Then again, having the support of one French billionaire, to the tune of a $131 million initial investment, should help make sure the cars stay in good shape. Tycoon Vincent Bollore has dropped this change in return for supplying the Autolib system with its first model vehicle, the Pininfarina Bluecar, according to Autoblog Green. The car's lithium battery pack allows a range of 155 miles, roughly the distance you could feasibly drive doing a day's worth of only short jaunts across the city neighborhoods. You'd have to be crazy to want to do long-haul trips on an Autolib car...have you seen their traffic?



If the program launches successfully, this could do wonders for Paris' infrastructure, as well as its reputation as one of the world's greenest cities. They are even looking at banning SUV's and other gas guzzlers from their city center! Can you imagine a New York or San Francisco doing the same? That Paris is even considering measures like these is a testament to their commitment to multimodal transportation - bikes, subways, and above all, walking truly take precedence here. To get people out of their cars, you must first give them a valid choice - that is the lesson American cities are still learning.

Like congestion pricing, with its successful implementation in London, ideas tend to spread among the global cities first (to New York and then San Francisco) and then trickle down the urban hierarchy.

Which means that by 2030, Seattle will have completed three multi-million dollar studies, hired international consultants to review the studies and conclude they're garbage, submitted the proposal to public comment and town meetings, then put it to a vote and, after it's voted down by the public, finally discover that Seattle's more expensive housing and lack of parking is itself the most effective form of "congestion pricing". Oh, you wanted electric car-sharing, too? That can wait until the next election cycle. We're just masters of the process, now, aren't we?

My Senior Thesis - The Real Deal!

Green My Fleet - An Analysis of Puget Sound Clean Air's

View more documents from dperl88.

Institutional Car-Sharing Takes Off!

What do the New York City Dept. of Transportation and the BMW headquarters have in common?

Both are on the cutting edge of institutions that use car-sharing, in which drivers reserve a shared fleet of vehicles for a flat administrative fee, to save both budget $ and greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.

Car-sharing differs from traditional rental car agencies and carpooling in several ways:

• Carsharing is not limited by office hours
• Reservation, pickup, and return is all self-service
• Vehicles can be rented by the minute, by the hour, as well as by the day
• Users are members and have been pre-approved to drive (background driving checks have been performed and a payment mechanism has been established)
• Vehicle locations are distributed throughout the service area, and often located for access by public transport.
• Insurance and fuel costs are included in the rates.
• Vehicles are not serviced (cleaning fueling) after each use, although certain programs such as Car2Go continuously clean and fuel their fleet

In short, car-sharing is a low-cost, low-maintenance, and low-emissions of way of getting access to cars to people only when they need it. In most cases, car-sharing has thrived in dense urban areas where access to walking, transit, and biking is widespread. For urban residents who need just the occasional one-off car trip, there is a huge cost-savings versus car ownership and the high insurance, maintenance, and purchase cost it entails.

In the US, the most successful car-sharing company has been ZipCar, which claims to remove 15-20 personal vehicles from the roads for every car-sharing vehicle it puts out and reduce an average of 5,500 vehicle miles traveled (VMT) for the average user. 

While individual drivers are the fuel that powers companies like ZipCar, institutions with larger user bases and even greater potential cost savings have started to catch on. This change from personal to institutional use could be the catalyst for ZipCar to become an economic engine in its own right, with a political influence to rival a Ford or a GM.

According to GOOD, New York City's Dept. of Transportation is beginning to replace its former in-house fleet with car-sharing to cut costs in the wake of the city's budget problems. About 300 department employees will share access to 25 ZipCars for work-related trips, saving the department $500,000 annually. Nearly all of the Manhattan-based cars will be Toyota Priuses. 

New York will join Washington DC and Philadelphia, where this car-sharing program has already been successful. The project will likely spread to other NYC municipal departments, further cementing the city's newfound green reputation. Mayor Bloomberg, you're all right!

According to Inhabitat, BMW is implementing a similar car-sharing program at its own headquarters in Munich, Germany. Cars will be available to all BMW employees and the general public at costs ranging from $22-45 per hour, which is not as expensive as it sounds, considering some of the available models run $100,000. If all goes well, the program could expand to all of BMW's facilities across Europe. A car-sharing platform that can rent out ANY model of Beamer any time, day or night? I could sign up for that.

What are the wider implications of institutional car-sharing? What we have long known as "the company car" may be soon obsolete, replaced with a more efficient, publicly available, and sustainable alternative.