Climate 411

Personal car sharing, a better way to get to the mountains without buying a new car. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Arthaey.

Across the country, car sharing has taken off. Programs like Zipcar, PhillyCarShare, Car2Go in Austin, Texas, City CarShare in San Francisco, as well as big name rental companies like Hertz and Enterprise, are helping people get around without owning a car. For many people who don’t want the hassle of car ownership—insurance, trips to the DMV, high gas prices, and parking—this is an easy option for the times they need a car to get to the beach or reach a far flung place not accessible via transit or bike.

By sharing rather than owning, car share participants cut their average vehicle use, which means a cut in gasoline consumption, greenhouse gas emissions and smog-forming pollution. A UC Berkeley study done for San Francisco’s City CarShare, found that 30% of City CarShare households sold one or more of their cars after joining the program and automobile travel among members dropped 47%. The study concluded that City CarShare members save 720 gallons of gas or 20,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions on a daily basis.

A new state bill, AB 1871, will be coming up for a vote on the Assembly floor next week. Introduced by California Assemblyman Dave Jones (D-Sacramento), AB 1871 would take car sharing one step further by removing some important barriers to car sharing. This has great potential for a range of arrangements that would ultimately lead to a reduction of vehicles in a given neighborhood.

Suppose, for instance, you’d  like to buy an SUV because you anticipate going skiing, or maybe you might want to buy a light-duty truck because every year you need it to haul your grandma’s jams to the farmer’s market. If you knew you could easily share a neighbor’s SUV or truck located just a block or two from your home, you might not feel compelled to buy the gas guzzler, and instead, opt for a smaller car for daily use.

In exchange for sharing his or her vehicle, under AB 1871, your neighbor with the truck would be reimbursed for the costs of operation by the car sharing company. This would help defray some of the truck’s fixed expenses, such as parking costs, though AB 1871 caps the reimbursement so the vehicle doesn’t become a commercial enterprise for the owner.

While this makes sense on paper, what happens when someone scratches the handle or gets into a more serious accident while driving your car? The basic gist of AB 1871 is this insurance piece, which is a tricky one. Currently, if an individual opts to put his or her own car into a car sharing program, a typical insurance company would consider the vehicle to be a commercial vehicle and would invalidate the individual’s personal insurance.

AB 1871 addresses this by clearly demarcating  liability. When a person’s personal vehicle is in the car sharing program, the program assumes all liabilities, and when it is in the owner’s possession, it goes back to being a personal vehicle covered by the owner’s own insurance.  This clear demarcation is helped through technology that records when the car is and isn’t under the car sharing program’s control.

These insurance fixes widen the scope of existing car sharing companies without putting more cars on the road. Carsharing programs are tough to get started in lower density areas as demand just isn’t high enough, and the capital costs of purchasing new fleets often isn’t worth it. With personal car sharing, these programs can begin to move out of urban areas, expanding transportation choices for more people.

The personal vehicle sharing company behind this legislation, Spride, is a Silicon Valley company started up by venture capitalist Sunil Paul. If AB 1871 is enacted, Spride aims to link up with San Francisco’s CityCarshare to run a pilot program, using the web and social networking to pair people with cars, with pricing based on make and model.

Car share aficionados in other states—especially Massachusetts where RelayRides is working– are watching what happens with the California legislation. Personal car sharing presents an innovative transportation choice that is financially smart, reduces greenhouse gases, and improves air quality. People want a variety of mobility options, and personal car sharing is a really creative way to solve these needs.

Transit cuts from coast to coast.

Today Transportation for America (T4) released an updated map of widespread transit cuts, layoffs, fare increases and service cuts across the U.S.

At Way2Go, we’ve written frequently about this transit funding crisis, as it is harming our mobility at a time when getting to work cleanly, reliably and inexpensively is very important. We’ve focused on how these cuts have affected communities throughout the country—rural, suburban, urban neighborhoods—and who it affects–students, less affluent citizens, and seniors.

And Americans do not want to see these cuts. T4’s most recent poll numbers, which we blogged about a few weeks ago, show that Americans want improved and better public transportation, and those polled would be willing to almost double current federal spending for public transportation, which is now at 18 cents to every dollar, to 37 cents to every dollar.

T4’s map is extensive, but needs your input. With public transportation ridership at record highs from coast to coast, these funding cuts are felt by many. Check out T4’s map to see if your town or city has been properly accounted for, so that T4 can articulate the true extent of this funding crisis.

The dangerous link between transportation and public health.

It is well-documented that traffic-related air pollution can lead to increased respiratory problems such as asthma. Several recent studies have also shown that emissions from cars, trucks, buses, and other vehicles can damage health in other ways, too. These include decreased brain function, increased heart attack risk, higher premature death rates, increased childhood allergies [PDF] — and now, higher miscarriage rates.

Specifically, nonsmokers and African American women living near busy roads are statistically more likely to miscarry within the first 20 weeks of pregnancy, according to a new study, “Residential Exposure to Traffic and Spontaneous Abortion,” published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. The study was produced by a team of scientists at the California Environmental Protection Agency, the California Department of Public Health, and the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry.

The authors examined data collected from women in California and found that pregnant African-American women who lived within 50 meters of heavy traffic were three times more likely to miscarry than African-American women who live in low-traffic areas. Nonsmokers living near busy roads were about 50 percent more likely to miscarry.

Though further studies with larger sample sizes are needed to confirm the findings, this study contributes to the mounting evidence on the harmful effects of traffic-related air pollution. It provides one more among a list of reasons to create a transportation system that pollutes much less than today’s system. Federal, state and local transportation policy needs to provide incentives to clean up dirty diesel engines, reduce traffic congestion, offer cleaner transportation choices, and generally create a more efficient and less polluting transportation system for people and freight.

A recent dinner guest revealed that he drives eight blocks to work each day, rain or shine. That’s eight short blocks. The guy is a healthy 20-something. Some days it takes him more time to drive than it would take him to walk.

How can we avoid the meter and be greener?

So why does he drive no matter what? He loves free parking.

See, at work his employer pays for his parking. If he kept his car at home during the day, he’d have to pay $100 a month to park in the lot linked to his apartment, or even more to park at another lot. Instead, every evening he drives back home, parks near his apartment complex after city street parking restrictions have expired, and wakes up the next morning to drive eight blocks to park for free at work.

Except that it isn’t really free. The rest of us pick up part of the costs of his parking habit–costs like health–threatening air pollution, earth-damaging greenhouse gas emissions, and road wear and tear.

That’s just a short list of parking costs. UCLA Professor Don Shoup has brilliantly established that parking costs everyone and that parking costs are hidden in nearly everything, from land values to groceries. He has also established that there are smart solutions, and most revolve around revealing the real costs of parking and pricing parking so as not to make everyone else pay for one driver’s decision to drive and park.

One of those solutions is parking cash-out. The idea is that an employer who wants to provide a perk to employees would provide a choice, instead of giving everyone a parking space. The choice would be between the parking spot or the cash. Employees could then use the cash to leave the car at home and spend the money on transit, a new bike helmet, or really comfortable walking shoes. The cash-out is counted as income, but there are some federal tax deductions for cash-out spent on transit or vanpools, and in some cases certain state tax deductions, too.

Parking cash-out programs work where they’re offered. Statistics range, depending on the location’s alternate transportation options, from a few percent to nearly 40 percent of employees who opt for the cash when it’s offered. As a result, the employer gets happier employees and reduces the number of parking spaces needed in the lease. Everyone gets a bit cleaner air and less traffic.

Cash-out isn’t offered as much as common sense would suggest this win-win might be. In the rare case where cash-out is required, it hasn’t always been enforced. Earlier this year, Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council co-sponsored successful legislation in California that gave certain local governments the option of enforcing the state’s parking cash-out law.

There’s no need to wait for a law to come to your community. Many employers around the country have voluntarily initiated their own parking cash-out programs. If yours hasn’t, ask about it.

Cash-out programs move us all closer to one important goal: giving commuters more choice even as they reduce their environmental impact.