Trying Zipcar

www.zipcar.com

I had my first Zipcar experience last week, when I drove my parents back to Union Station after their visit. Car-sharing is really a slick situation, and aside from the two buses I had to take to reach the car (Zipcar restricts its fleets to UCLA and USC), the sharing worked smoothly.

The car was a Hybrid Honda Civic with a few dents, but otherwise clean and easy to use. I tapped my handy Zipcard to to windshield to open the car, and we were off. Easy. Zipcar has a rule that you have to fill the gas tank if it’s 1/4 or below, so after dropping off my parents, I pulled into the station and used Zipcar’s pre-paid gas car to fill up. Then, I drove back to UCLA, left the car where I found it, and hopped on the bus to get home.

At $9.25/hour, Zipcar isn’t the cheapest way to get a car for the day, but for those who are car-free (and don’t own our own car insurance policy), it’s actually comparable to car rentals. When I did the comparison, it came up pretty even– until I looked into the times I would be able to pick up and drop off the car. It turns out that, with regular car rentals, I’d have to rent the car for two full days just to get my parents to the train station for their 6:45pm departure.  Zipcar it was.

The only beef I have about Zipcar is the lack of cars in LA. There used to be car-sharing options all over the city until Zipcar reduced its fleet. Still, it’s a decent option for every so often in a pinch.

My Parents take a Car-Free Vacation

Amtrak

My parents live in a small town in Wisconsin with just one stop light. In the heart of town, the roads are wide, and traffic is light. When they first visited me here a few years ago, Los Angeles traffic was a shock to them. How could traffic be at a standstill when our freeways have so many lanes? How could rush hour start at 2pm on Friday? Why do our Starbucks have drive-throughs? While here, my parents braved the 405 on a Friday. They wrestled with the 10/110 interchange. They learned the subtle art of repressing road rage. I think they were relieved to get home to their wide roads with ample parking when the visit was all over.

Last week, my parents came for another visit — their first since I’ve gone car-free. I sat down with pen and paper to figure out how we’d get around:

Plan #1: Rent a car for the week. At first, this seemed like a great option. We could drive from place to place and see the city, unencumbered. Then I looked at the rental rates for a person without any car insurance. Pricey.

Plan #2: Rent the car just for a few days, so we could see some sights. This turned out to be not much better than renting a car for the full week, though. Local car rental shops often close at 6pm and on weekends, so we’d have to do a longer-term rental whether we wanted to or not.

Plan #3: Use car-sharing (Zipcar) to get my parents and their luggage to and from the train station (my dad doesn’t fly), and give my folks an otherwise car-free vacation. This is what we ended up doing.

So, did we stay in my apartment watching old movies the whole week? Not at all! We got a roll of quarters from the bank and took the bus. We went to the Getty, the beaches, and a few museums. Once my parents got the hang of the fare boxes and the system, they rode quite comfortably — so comfortably that, when the time came to use the car-sharing service for the trip back, my mom kept proposing a bus trip instead. “Isn’t there a bus that can take us? That would be an easier way.” When, on the ride to the train station (in the Zipcar), we got stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, I asked my dad how this trip (without a car) compared to previous trips, when I’d owned a car. “Oh, this was much better, I think,” he said. Then, after a pause, he said, “I’ve been looking, and all these cars have just one person inside. That’s the problem.”

Celebrate World Car-Free Day on Monday, Sept. 22nd

Bike It!

Monday is World Car-Free Day. People around the world will be imagining a world free from cars and the social ills cars can promote.

What do you imagine the world might be like with fewer cars on the road? Would we have more parks and open space? Would we have a greater sense of community? Would we buy less stuff that we don’t need? I’d love to hear your thoughts–

Also, if you know of car-free events in Los Angeles on Monday, please visit this site and add them to the official wiki:

Car-Free Day Events — Add information to this Wiki if you know of an event

Car-Sharing and out-of-town guests

www.zipcar.com

I’ll soon have my first out-of-town guests since becoming car-free. Of course, I’ll need a car to collect the guests (and their luggage) from Union Station. And what will I do when I’m ready to show them the sights?

First, I looked into where the sights are. A lot of LA hotspots are far from where I live, but there’s a surprising amount of attractions in my neighborhood. With a little googling, I got an impressive list of museums and tours, along with a few haunts for locals. Some of my favorite spots, though (The Getty, Huntington Library, Griffith Observatory), would take quite a long while to reach by bus.

So… I looked into renting a car for the entire visit (6 days). The price wasn’t nearly as expensive as car ownership, but it was still a whopping $150 — before the $11/day fee for car insurance was tacked on. So I looked into renting a car just for the weekend — to get us to and from Union Station and maybe do a little downtown sightseeing. Unfortunately, most neighborhood car rental places are closed on Sundays and open for only a few hours on Saturdays, so I would have to keep the car longer than I wanted — still not what I was hoping for. What I needed was a car that I could borrow for a couple of hours for the Union Station trips — and maybe a day or two when my guests wanted to see parts of LA that are hard to get to by bus. More flexibility. That’s what I needed.

Finally, I checked out car-sharing. Car-sharing is designed for folks who are car-free.  Insurance and gas are included in the price of the rental, and members can rent a car for a few hours or a few days — checking the car in and out any time of the day, on Sundays, in the middle of the night, or early in the morning. Sounds perfect, right? Well, not exactly. Los Angeles used to be served by the car-sharing company Flexcar. Flexcar had cars throughout the city — one just down the street from my house. Last year, though, the industry leader, Zipcar, bought Flexcar — and Zipcar took away all their vehicles in Los Angeles except those at UCLA and USC. I’ve been pretty bummed to lose Flexcar’s great fleet, but after checking out car rental places, I figured I might give Zipcar a look. Even if I have to take two buses to get to the car, it might be worth the cost to have the flexibility of renting a car any time of the day, without an early reservation.

It turns out that, with insurance fees and gas for car rentals, I could save a little money by using Zipcar — and I could gain a lot of flexibility. So I did it. I signed up and should get my little member card any day now. We’ll see how it goes.

Safe Cycling

Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition

When I first started cycling to work, I was more than a little intimidated by the traffic. It’s scary to navigate cars that get impatient with each other for hesitating a moment at a red light, let alone a little lady cycling on a 10-year-old bike. Still, once I realized that biking was my most reliable form of transit, I was committed to learning the ropes of bicycle commuting.  I started out on the sidewalks — partly because I was riding so slowly (I learned later this was because my tires had 75% less pressure than they should have). Still, sidewalks are dangerous and annoying. There are pedestrians, driveways, ice cream carts, and taco trucks. To ride safely (without hurting anyone), it would take me nearly 30 minutes to go 3 miles.

Enter Ron Durgin’s bicycle safety class. Ron Durgin represents the Los Angeles Bicycle Coalition in teaching both classroom and road safety classes for bicyclists. This class changed my commuting world. Ron helped me figure out why my bike was so slow (he even pumped my tires for me). He also walked the class through the rules of the road — and showed us how we could find the safest routes, share the road with cars, and direct traffic with good cycling habits.

I don’t know if future classes are in the works (the road portion of the class is amazing), but the classroom portion was derived at least partly from this booklet put out by the Los Angeles Bicycle Coalition: “Bicycling Street Smarts.”

Many women cyclists I meet in particular are hesitant to share the road with cars. I was one of them. But the class shows that it really can be safe to share the road. With my plumped-up tires and and new riding habits, I’ve cut my commute time nearly in half — and ironically enough, feel much safer than I once felt on the sidewalks.

Getting Started: Imagining the Possibilities

How to Live Well Without Owning a Car, by Chris Balish

One of the first things I did when I got the notion to become car-free was head to the library. I needed expert advice on how to get around, and I figured someone somewhere would have written about this stuff. I was right. Among the car-free books, I found Chris Balish’s How to Live Well Without Owning a Car. It’s an excellent how-to guide, including information on how to get groceries, what to do about dating, and a gradual method to finding out how to get to and from work reliably. Balish also includes a hefty section to help you think about why going car-free doesn’t have to be a sacrifice.

Beginning the car-free journey

Cycling

In January of 2008, I made one of my first new year’s resolutions ever. After a string of bad luck with my aging car (including a hunk of metal just falling off and scraping along the street for a few miles), I was sick of my car. I was sick of getting it fixed, putting gas in it, and I was sick of sitting in traffic. In what seemed like a radical idea, I decided to just stop using the car altogether, to see if I could do it. The result? I’m now car-free.

Below are a few of my early adventures in car-free living. Back then I used an electric scooter (which was ultimately impractical) and took the bus quite a bit. These days, I use my bicycle and bus passes to get around.

The Beginning of my Journey (from Motorboard to bus to bicycle):

Car-Free in LA: Girl Meets Motorboard

The Urban Motorboarder’s Backup

Cars as Safety Devices