A smarter fleet?
Last fall, Daimler AG kicked off a car-sharing system in Ulm, Germany, using the fortwo car by Daimler’s smart subsidiary. Stateside greenies were wondering when it would come here, and now it is, sort of, in Austin:
The city will set aside urban-core parking spaces for 200 of Daimler’s smart cars. Rather than paying for the spaces, Daimler will let city employees use the cars for a number of hours that’s equal to the monetary value of the spaces. (That amount hasn’t been determined yet; it will be negotiated over the next few weeks, city officials said.)
The program will start in October and run for six months. Daimler will pay for fuel, maintenance and insurance during that time. After six months, city officials will evaluate whether it saves money to lease the cars for the long term. Austin currently spends $6 million to $7 million on its fleet of 1,800 light-duty vehicles.
Keeping track of usage is simple enough:
Employees would have to register to use the cars. They’d swipe a digital card across a car windshield, type in a pin code and drive.
As always, I checked with the Austin Contrarian, and he suggests that downtown apartment owners might want a piece of this action:
Downtown developers ought to be interested in this, too. They pay bundles for structured parking — $15,000, $20,000 or more per spot. Building fewer spots would lower costs, which might make some marginal projects feasible.
Could a car-share program work for the apartment buildings downtown? Maybe. The cost of purchasing a few cars every other year would be small relative to their annual operations budget. They could recoup much (if not all) of the cost by renting out the cars to residents at an hourly rate. The cost of storing the cars would be zero, since every apartment building has surplus parking spaces. And if fewer renters brought cars along with their futons, the apartments could be built with less parking.
Apartment managers could use the program to entice renters: “Skip the car payment but not the car.” Getting to the rental car in the first place — or the car to the renter — is normally a big hassle, but it wouldn’t be when the car was sitting in a garage ten floors down.
I have only one real reservation about this particular scheme, to the extent that it’s extended to civilians, and it’s fairly minor: if you’re successfully leading a car-free existence in one of our urban wonderlands, at the time you actually need a car for some serious transportation purpose, there’s a reasonable possibility you might need something a bit larger than the diminutive smart fortwo, which is something less than ideal for a biweekly trip to the supermarket owing to a distinct lack of storage space. (Honda? You listening? We want Fits.)
