“It’s mostly the private sector that has solved problems,” Pam Cooley tells me over breakfast at the Ardmore. Cooley is the marketing half of CarShareHFX. It’s the latest venture in an impressive career of social enterprise—for-profit companies designed for the public good.
Cooley has worked to safely return Guatemalan refugees from camps in Mexico, and negotiated the inclusion of social housing and community spaces in the new Woodward’s building in Vancouver’s downtown eastside. With her parents aging, Cooley wanted to come home to Halifax.
Here she met Peter Zimmer, a local inventor, entrepreneur and activist. “He was obsessed with car-share,” she recalls. “People with passion inspire me.” She points out the window at the Quinpool traffic. “And these things will be the death of us.”
Yet Cooley admits to having a lifelong love affair with the automobile. “My payback is two years without pay,” she jokes.
Car sharing is not a new concept. The idea for membership-based, short-term car rentals goes back to the 1940s. The first successful citywide car-share program started in Amsterdam in the ’70s and ran for more than a decade. Car-share hit North America in the early ’90s, starting in Quebec, where Communauto now serves four cities. Vancouver and Toronto soon got into the act, and a mere decade later, Halifax caught on.
As Cooley puts it, the idea is to make it “really dumb to own a car” by providing a more affordable, convenient alternative. The price of membership is set low enough that many folks who can’t afford to own cars can still buy into this alternative.
With an unreliable, under-funded public transit system, weak bike culture and a rural population of about 90,000 people spread over a land base of 5,500 square kilometres, car-share seems like a natural for HRM. But Cooley says that as the national car-share industry grows 30 percent a year business in Halifax has been slower than expected.
She remains undaunted. “We have over 250 members and growing,” she says. “Over the weekend 10 new people joined,” most of them gearing up for spring and summer road trips. Each paid a $200 membership fee and can now rent one of nine vehicles for $9 an hour, or $10 during peak hours. Cooley says that every 100 CarShare members amounts to 30 fewer cars on the road.
But the company’s most important target area for growth is corporate membership. “Our goal is to have all three levels of government using it during the day,” Cooley says.
Capital Health is already a member, and after two years of contract negotiations the provincial government has finally signed on. This development is huge because the provincial government has about twice as many departments as CarShareHFX currently has cars. “We need to expand,” Cooley acknowledges.
She is also negotiating a pilot project with Nova Scotia Power, but HRM itself has been a holdout all along, preferring to maintain its own fleet and adding the occasional Smart car.
Still, CarShareHFX’s expanding corporate memberships are building toward a critical mass, in which downtown employees can leave their cars at home or, better yet, get rid of them. Instead they can ride the bus to work and use CarShare cars during the day for business meetings. If it works, companies save money on employee parking costs and can instead provide tax deductible bus passes.
The vision is that this critical shift in downtown car culture ripples outward to the burbs and rural areas, with CarShareHFX cars eventually available in every neighbourhood. But for that to happen, Cooley says the business “needs a champion everywhere,” in every hub and emerging hub of the region.
It would help if car sharing were part of a region-wide transportation strategy. “It’s a non-subsidized way to build another transit option,” Cooley says, “part of the mobility mix, or eco-combo of public transit, rebates on bikes and walking shoes, and CarShare.”
An idea like that might seem like pie in the sky coming from an NGO worker without a track record of implementation. But Cooley has that track record, and wants to work with the municipality to make Carshare part of a legitimately sustainable transit system.
Ultimately, though, Cooley expects issues beyond her control to catalyze change. “People will get smarter as oil prices rise—CarShare will become the norm.”
This article appears in May 13-19, 2010.
I think CarShare is an excellent idea. The lack of participation, I think, is due to the lack of knowledge people have about it. I only heard about it recently through someone at this site. And, when I speak about it as an option to others, they don’t know what I’m talking about.
I’d like to use this, but there isn’t one near me in Dartmouth
It will never be a norm for my needs unless they guarantee a car in my driveway waiting for me alone between the hours of 7:30 to 9:30 am each morning and then again at night between the hours of 5:30 to 7:30 (at work, where I left it), cut the fee to less than half price, and let me keep it in my driveway on weekends.
I can’t stand the bus or the fixed schedule that comes with it, and it’s too far to bike or walk to work; and that’s a shame as that would be a wonderful commute for me at least 8 months of the year. So I need a car.
Just once I’d like to be part of the solution, but I just don’t fit in!
Below I’ll discuss only the commute to work aspect of my needs.
If my needs (demands) could be met by a care-share program, it would presumably save me nothing as ownership is cheaper than $40 a day (based on the reserved hours stated above); only about $20 in fact does a $400/month car cost Smee spread over 20 working days/month.
If I was only charged for the time used in travel to and from work, I’d be breaking even with the ownership verses care-share plan.
So, it is a no-brainer that I buy my own car, I get to personalize it the way I want, keep all my shit in it, and have it 24/7 at my every whim for my exclusive use.
But environmentally speaking, my ‘footprint’ is the same, no matter which direction I tread. Excluding the environmental impact of producing another vehicle. That brings in an interesting thought though Chris, what is the environmental ‘weight’ of a shiny new car in the auto dealer’s lot?
I use CarShareHfx.ca — actually, I sold my car when it was confirmed that they were on their way to the city. They’re a terrific company. Pam and Peter are wonderful to deal with. Car sharing is an excellent way to have a car for those time when you really need one but walk/bus/bike when you don’t. If you live and work on the Peninsula in Halifax, CarShareHfx means you keep more of your money in your pocket each month. Another huge bonus is that if I ever need my own personal car sometime in the future, because I’m insured under their membership, this keeps my insurance rates where they were, and that was low compared to many. There are all kinds of benefits from being a car sharing person.
Car share and bike share seem like great ideas. I was recently in Montreal and was impressed by the bike share system, with stations where you could actually pop in a credit card and rent a bike on the spot.
I’m intrigued, though, by the first line of the article. “In a post-carbon world…” What are these cars running on? I personally can’t foresee a world operating without carbon!! I think maybe our use of the word carbon has gone off the rails a bit!!
Car Share is a good idea, but Smee is right; the costs involved in the Car Share program don’t do anything to draw existing car owners will make the battle to get people away from individual ownership an entirely uphill battle. Secondly, the car types are compacts, with the exception of one Kia Rondo that is stationed in the downtown core.
I think for them to really get people behind it, they’ll need to expand their fleet, especially into something larger and bigger cargo capacity than a Kia Rondo. I know that would be against what the program stands for, but to make serious in roads to make the average car owner want to use the service. Hell, toss a minivan or even a small truck into the fleet. Sure, they consume a bit more gas, but people need the utility.
It’s a good service though, despite these faults. But it’s really more for those who are just on the cusp of owning a vehicle, or for those who only use their vehicle less than 2 or 3 times a week. But really who is that? Students primarily, but certainly not families.
I’ve been a CarShareHFX member for just about a year now. It is certainly not going to work for someone like Smee or anyone that needs a car for their commute to work. But if you’re able to walk, bike, or take transit for your daily commute then CarShareHFX is great to fill in most other car needs. There are times when taking a taxi makes more sense than booking a car. The key thing is that I have a car available to me just about whenever I want and I am paying a fraction of what I would to own a car. There have been times in the last year when I have wanted to own a car but with the options available to me there hasn’t been a time I needed my own car. It’s not going to fit every ones lifestyle but for a lot of people it can be a great choice.