I don’t own a car… Haven’t for while actually. The past couple of years or so that I was in San Francisco, I was traveling so much that a car would have sat around quite a lot anyhow, and when I moved out here Megan had a car… Since then I’ve been getting by just fine with my Vespa, but once in a while a car is handy. When I arrived in Madison I googled car sharing madison wisconsin, and came up with a project in the works to start a car-sharing operation here in town. Well, it finally launched yesterday, and I’m a charter member of Community Car. It’ll be interesting to see how the program works, both on a personal basis and in general. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to have my graduate assistantship fund some research to go along with the rollout of the program, because I’d like to see how car sharing effects people’s transportation behavior. The original premise of many car sharing programs was that they would reduce overall automobile travel, but it now seems that’s not necessarily the case. In fact, for people like me, they may in fact enable auto travel that wouldn’t have occured otherwise. That said, there are major benefits to sharing cars. The average person auto is only used 2-5% of the time, while an auto in a car-sharing program can be used 25% of the time or more. This in itself means savings not only in individuals terms but also for society at large in terms of fewer cars manufactured and fewer parking spaces required, among other things.

The only downside so far is that I had to surrender my CA license in exchange for a Wisconsin license so that I could join the program. They took it away so quick! Ah well, I’ll probably trade it back in a couple of years…