Streetsblog Los Angeles

(This is part two of our series on reader’s response to last week’s series on Buy Here Pay Here used car dealerships.  Earlier, Streetsblog published the comments  of Joe Linton, Roadblick, Adrian Martinez, Damien Goodmon and Allison Mannos.  Yesterday, Streetsblog published a more detailed response from Occidental College Professor Mark Vallianatos.  Today, we feature a piece by Community Voice Newspaper Editor and Eastside Bike Club President Carlos Morales.  Stick with this story until the end, it’s worth it. – DN)

My take on proving a solution to this problem would be to create a communal car pool system.

Large corporations are the only companies that I am aware of that have formed and utilize carpools to gain tax credits for both the employee and employers.  Employees use this incentive to save on their gas expenses and parking fees while employers utilize it gain another tax shelter.

If families or community participants can pull their money together set up a “Cundina” or “Tanda” which is interest free way of saving money (it is their own money.)  This systematic lottery is very common in Mexico and seems to have started in Puebla Mexico in the late 1800′s modeled after Chinese workers came to Mexico with the “Hui” a communal rotating credit association.  This practice has crossed and spread over to other communities across this country.

Here is how the cundina works:  A group of trusted friends / family members / neighbors get together decide on a leader, which will be in charge of the collection and distribution of money.  The group decides on the amount of money to be collected and how often the pot is awarded (each week, month or other pre-arranged time frame.)

It starts by each participant pulling a number which is written on a piece of paper that has been placed from a bowl, a hat or a box.  The amount of numbers are determined by the amount of participants, if there are ten participants for example the numbers will range from one thru ten.  The person who pulls number one gets the first distribution of funds, then number two the next time and so on. Read more…

Last week, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation released a report on the slow-growth success of car sharing in Los Angeles.  LADOT recommended renewing its program of providing free on-street parking for Zip Car vehicles up to 40 spaces so that the current level of car share is preserved while other options are examined.  Even if all 40 spaces were full, and they’re not, there would be less than on Zip Car for every 100,000 people in Los Angeles, a much smaller investment than what the car sharing giant has put in to San Francisco which boasts hundreds of cars.

Car sharing is considered by many urban advocates as a key component of encouraging a car-free lifestyle.  The argument goes that families that own cars for a couple hours of travel per week, i.e. ones where people work from home or within walking/biking/transit distance to work, but still own a car for longer trips can get rid of their car if there’s a reliable car share system nearby.

Noted author and researcher Todd Littman noted in 1999 that car ownership is inefficient.  In “Evaluating Carsharing Benefits,” a publication by the Victoria Transportation Policy Institute, Littman shows the tremendous economic benefits for residents and businesses of having car share nearby.

Yet, Los Angeles’ car share program is far from complete.  If I wanted to use car share from my Westside abode, my options would be to travel five miles to UCLA or travel to the airport to a car available through the locally owned LAX Car Share.  That’s not too terrible, but it would add 40 minutes to most trips when you consider my bike speed traveling with child or taking buses in traffic combined with a walk to the car share spaces. Read more…

In the third episode of our Moving Beyond the Automobile series, Streetfilms takes a look at a more efficient way to use cars. Unlike owning a car, which involves a large upfront purchase and low costs per trip, car-sharing allows people to evaluate the full cost of each car trip. When car-share members choose whether to drive, take transit, walk, or bike, the incentives guide them toward the most appropriate mode for that specific trip. Driving half a mile to pick up some milk starts to make a lot less sense.

Zipcar, a leading car-share company, reports that members save $600 a month compared to the costs of owning an automobile. They also walk and bike 10 to 15 percent more than they did before joining Zipcar.

So while car-sharing isn’t exactly “beyond the automobile,” it is a great way to help cut traffic, reduce the space taken up by private cars, and make city streets more efficient.

This series is made possible by funding from the Fund for The Environment & Urban Life.

As more teens wait to get their licenses and young adults drive fewer miles annually, advertisers have begun to point to advances in digital technology to explain the trend. Many younger adults use digital media to connect to their friends virtually, the argument goes, and technological innovations will likely reduce the incentive to own and operate a car.

Now, with the passage of a new law in California that allows current car owners to share their personal vehicles in a car sharing service and make money without voiding their personal insurance policy, the age of owning a car as a rite of American adulthood may be ceding to a new vision of vehicles as a social service.

Because your car spends on average more than 90 percent of the time parked and idle, proponents of personal vehicle sharing argue, why not make money instead of sitting by as your investment depreciates in a garage?

“We feel like this is a historic moment. This legislation basically revolutionizes the idea of the automobile into being a shared service,” said Sunil Paul, CEO of Spride Inc, a personal car-sharing start-up company. “We think it can have a huge impact over the next many years about the way we think about the automobile.”

On the heels of the announcement that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed AB 1871 into law yesterday, Spride and City Carshare, the San Francisco non-profit that helped pioneer car sharing, announced a partnership to facilitate personal car sharing in the Bay Area. Once AB 1871 takes effect January 1st, the new Spride Share pilot program will allow car owners to loan their vehicles to the more than 13,000 screened and qualified members of City CarShare, offsetting the costs and environmental impact of private car ownership while providing City CarShare members with access to a greater variety of vehicles.

Car owners who choose to participate in the program will outfit their cars with City Carshare’s key and lock technology and designate the hours their vehicle will be free through CitycarShare’s website. Very little will change for existing City CarShare members, except they will have a wider selection of vehicles, some of them owned by individuals instead of the non-profit. Paul announced he would be signing up his own Toyota Hylander Hybrid as the first personal vehicle in the fleet. Read more…

Car sharing is a growth industry, as pioneer City CarShare would tell you, and it has beneficial environmental and economic impacts. Studies of car sharing services like Zipcar and City CarShare show that for every car that is shared, up to 15 private vehicles are taken off the road. Owning and operating a personal car is the second-highest family expense behind owning a house, and the highest expense for people who rent.

The car sharing model, however, is predicated on operating in dense urban areas where there is good transit and a large pool of prospective customers who don't want to own a car. On the other hand, it doesn't make financial sense for car sharing companies to operate in suburbs or rural areas. Not yet, at least.

City CarShare is trying to pioneer personal vehicle sharing, where car owners would make their vehicles available to a pre-screened pool of personal vehicle sharing participants during the periods of the day when their car is not in use, which for many vehicles is upwards of 90 percent of the time.

If you drove to work in San Francisco and left your car idle from 8 am to 6 pm, for instance, you could allow a pool of prospective vehicle share participants to use your car, for which you would make enough money to cover the cost of usage. If you consider the cost of owning and insuring your car to already be a sunken expense, this could be a way to "make" money for a commodity that is otherwise depreciating in value.

Of the many challenges to expanding car sharing to privately owned vehicles, the first obstacle is current insurance law. In most states, unless you are commercially licensed or you operate a livery service, receiving compensation from others for using your vehicle voids your personal car insurance coverage.

To this end, City CarShare has been working with California State Assemblymember Dave Jones (D-Sacramento) and Spride Share, a new company started by cleantech financier Sunil Paul of Spring Ventures, to draft Assembly Bill 1871, which would change insurance law to permit remuneration for personal vehicle sharing.

"The idea is to make it possible for people to participate in car-sharing programs," said Assemblymember Jones. "This is part of a package of approaches that look at ways we can engage insurance companies in a positive way to encourage better environmental behavior."

Read more...

Earlier today Mayor Villaraigosa, city officials, and representatives from Zipcar, UCLA and USC celebrated the arrival of 12 new off-campus parking spaces reserved specifically for car-sharing near the two college campuses. The hope is that if these spaces prove profitable for the car-sharing company than they can partner with the city for more of these types of spaces in places other than on or adjacent to college campuses.

While the twelve spaces are good news, even considering that the spaces happen to be very near the only Zipcar spaces still in existence in the city, Villaraigosa and others seem to have gotten a little carried away in the impact this will have on the car-culture of Los Angeles. From the press release:

Los Angeles may be the car capital of the world, but through this partnership
among universities, Zipcar and the City of Los Angeles we are opening the door
to make car ownership optional for people who live or work here," said Mayor
Antonio Villaraigosa. "Providing alternatives to car ownership will help
improve the environment and the city’s traffic congestion.

That’s a lot of sound for twelve converted parking spaces. Think of how much congestion could be saved by a large-scale parking reform plan, or a car-sharing plan that was available city-wide.

Read more…

In an editorial earlier today, the Daily Breeze, a newspaper covering the area between LAX and the Harbor, praised the city for moving ahead with a car sharing program and studying bike share.  In its own words the Breeze made the case for shared vehicles and managed to do it without calling supporters communists:

With a down economy, people throughout the Los
Angeles region are looking for ways to cut costs and save money. Now
the city of Los Angeles is working on programs to help folks do that -
through the concept of sharing cars and bicycles…

…The program is designed for urban residents who
no longer want to be burdened by the costs of car ownership, which
include fuel, financing, maintenance, insurance and related taxes.
These folks would use a combination of public transit and car sharing
to go about their daily lives. They can reserve a car online or by
phone in 10 minutes. And with a membership, they can quickly check out cars whose keys are stored in their glove compartments.

After similarly praising and explaining bike share, the editorial then ventured into Streetsblog territory by calling on the city to reduce its take home vehicle fleet and invest in car sharing for downtowners and government offices.

For example, instead of financing city-owned cars
for council members, why not just offer them paid Zipcar memberships
and access to bikes when why need to travel around the city? After all,
if the idea is good for average residents, it should also apply to city
employees and elected officials as well, especially when budget cuts
are on the horizon.

Is a movement growing to begin to truly pare down the fleet of vehicles that are treated as private property by city employees?  When Mayor Villaraigosa proposed cutting the size of the executive car fleet in 2008, the response was horror and outrage from City Council Members who claimed they were really concerned about the environment.  With the city and state in a full budget crisis, and with a recession slamming Southern Californians the response from our elected leadership might not be so tone deaf it the idea comes up again.

Photos: Sally M and jm3/Flickr

For car-sharing to every truly work, the cars used in the program need to be easily accessible to the members who have access to rent them.  To that end, the City Council has cleared out 10 parking spaces near USC and UCLA to pilot the return of Zipcars to the streets of Los Angeles.

Longtime Streetsblog readers will remember that Los Angeles used to be served by Flexcar, the only national competition that Zipcar faced.  But, after the two car-share giants merged just over a year ago instead of more service, Zipcar shrank local car sharing back inside the college campuses of USC and UCLA leaving many subscribers high and dry.  Now, to their credit, the city is working with Zipcar to try and slowly bring the service back.  If the service in and around the two college campuses is successful, the Council promises an expanded program for Hollywood, the Downtown and Venice.

While the Council deserves credit for promoting alternative transportation at the expense of public parking, this is just a baby step to getting a city-wide car sharing program.  If the city wants to live up to its rhetoric on the importance of car sharing, it could always embrace the Philadelphia model, where they cut their take-home program for city employees and use the money to embrace in a car-sharing program that could be used for both city employees and residents.

For a full copy of the press from Councilman Bill Rosendahl release announcing the program, read on after the jump.

Read more...

Back in January of 2008, the nation's two largest car-sharing programs, Zip Car and Flex Car, merged leaving many car-free Angelenos hopeful that L.A. would see a largest car-sharing program come to Los Angeles.  Instead, the opposite happened, and car sharing disappeared from every part of the city except the areas surrounding UCLA and USC.  Since then the City has taken baby steps to encourage the growth of a car-sharing program.

So far, the city's efforts have been less than inspiring.  Rather than embrace the kind of far-reaching reform that could change the way car-sharing companies and entrepreneurs the city has taken a more cautious route and a year after Zip Cars practically zipped out of the city the city is one step away from creating a program that would allocate street parking spaces for licensed and approved car sharing programs. The City Council Transportation Committee directed the City Attorney to write a legal document that would allow the city to dedicate parking for a car-sharing program.  The Committee will hear their proposal on Wednesday.

In other words, the new program would take away general street parking to create dedicated parking just for vehicles that are a part of a car-share program.   There's just one problem: thus far the car sharing companies are most interested in expanding service around the college campuses and not so excited about the rest of the city.

Read more...

No, this isn’t another story about critical mass.

Back when I was a wee Streetsblogger back in rural Pennsylvania, the local county fair had an event where people could pay a certain amount of money to smash a car with a sledge hammer.  While this random act of violence had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with smashing things, that doesn’t mean that a similar act can’t be used as a form of political impression.

Tomorrow night at 7:30 at The Loft, Browne Molyneaux will be hosting the "Murder Your Car! Art Project" which is exactly you think it is: namely, the public destruction of a car with a baseball bat  The performance art is part of the "Post-Post Apocalypse Exhibit."  For anyone that doesn’t get it, Molyneaux explained the ideas and theory behind the exhibit in one of Streetsblog’s pre-Christmas interviews:

To me my anti-car stance and I say anti and not pro alternative
transportation, because I want it to be known that I’m firmly
anti-consumer driven lifestyle. I know in some parts of the city a car
is truly a necessity, but in Hollywood, Santa Monica and donwntown if
you are child free you don’t need one. I want to challenge that person to get rid of the biggest chain of consumerism in LA: The car.

For more on the event, head over to Gary Rides Bikes, or The Bus Bench.

Photo: Express Milwaukee