Social Cars
Posted on:: October 21st, 2003
Daniel Luke has a plan for getting away from relying on the private ownership of cars to get us around. The plan would require a wrenching change, which is both an argument for it and against it. Frankly, I think the odds are stacked just too high against it, but since when have I ever been right?
Auto Grid Meme Gets Loose
While I was busy yesterday, mocking the likelihood of car downtime being shared the way grid computing wants to share CPU cycles, Dave Weinberger was already pointing to Daniel Luke’s Radiocar: Killer App for the Mobile Internet scenario and I’m
The Radiocar concept is similar in many ways to car sharing which exists in the U.S and is already successful here (or on the brink of it). Radiocar should be even more popular than traditional car sharing because technology is brought to bear to make it a much more conveient and flexible service.
I do not expect Radiocar or anything else to supplant the prevailing model of private automobile ownership any time soon. Rather, I think that two or more models could co-exist together and even complement each other. It’s not a matter of having to choose between one or the other, as I see it. Rather, it’s about having more choice–usually a good thing, and in this case no exception.
Radiocar would present a technical challenge, but just about every piece of it is already being done somewhere. It would not even require infrastructural change the way a new rail line, say, would. It’s just putting stuff that already exists together for a novel purpose. All the heavy lifting (in this case rockets sending up GPS satellites) has already been done. I was quite skeptical myself for a long time of the immediate feasability, but I’ve been paying attention to technological developments in disperate areas, and I think it could work now even in the U.S. The odds for success are perhaps even greater for Japan, S. Korea, and many places in Europe (where traditional car sharing has succeeded for over ten years).
Nevertheless, I’m curious to know, David, what odds you think this idea has stacked against it?
I guess this is just an example of the “successful auto sharing” – here in Vancouver we have a well-established experiment that keeps growing.
It is called “The Cooperative Auto Network”, and now provides about 75 cars to be shared based on reserving a car for when it is needed.
More info can be found at http://www.cooperativeauto.net
David: our own hometown of Brookline has a similar service: Zipcar. You may have seen them: lime green Beetles. One is parked in the lot behind the Coolidge Corner Theater.
Zipcar is only superficially similar to Radiocar. There are in fact massive differnces.
Ned, when my family went from 3 cars to 1 recently, we were hoping ZipCars would work for us. But they’re way too expensive, something like $18/hour. So, if I need a ride to Waltham for a 2 hour meeting, I’m looking at $50-60. They’re a nice idea but they don’t work well with our usage patterns.
All current car sharing organizations have severe limitations because, for one thing, they’re not designed to allow one-way trips. With Zipcar, you must always return the car to where the trip originated. Thus you can’t release a car once you reach your destination. Radiocar is meant to allow one-way trips. Therefore, if your destination happened to be in the zone, (the idea is to gradually put the entire city under the zone) you would have had the option of releasing the car once you reached your destination, and in contrast to Zipcar, you wouldn’t have had to pay for the two hours the car was sitting in the parking lot while you were attending a meeting. If you had made the Radiocar available to other Radiocar members while you were in the meeting, and someone actually used it, the parking-provision obligation of whoever it was that was providing parking would have been tangentially less.
Zipcar seems to work ok for me and my gf ;)
I love zipcars. They are great
Zipcars are nice..Excellent..