A Zipcar — a car that is rented out on an hourly basis as part of a club membership program — waits in a parking lot at Brown University. The trend started in Europe in the 1990s.

The Providence Journal / Steve Szydlowski

Car sharing may be the answer to the urban dweller’s dream of having a car and not keeping it.

Certainly, car sharing is gaining a foothold in the United States since it was introduced in the late 1990s with growing numbers of city folks taking advantage of a service that provides easy and in many cases instant access to cars for limited periods of time.

“In general, the ingredients for success for car sharing are dense populations with good public transportation, urban dwellers who do not need cars to commute between home and work,” said John Williams, spokesman for Seattle-based Flexcar. “It’s a lifestyle choice for them. They don’t want the high cost of ownership, the hassles of ownership.”

For a small fee, members sign up and, after being vetted, are provided with a flashcard that provides access to a fleet of cars at hundreds of locations in select cites, depending on the company. Members book a car by phone or online, turn up, unlock the car with their flashcard, use it and return it. No dealing with reservation clerks or worries about fuel or insurance — it’s all included. The flashcard records the details of the trip — mileage, fuel use, etc. — and sends the information to a central file and you are billed accordingly. Rates differ, but most work out at about $9 an hour.

The largest North American car-sharing company — Cambridge, Mass.-based Zipcar — has more than 70,000 customers and nearly 2,000 vehicles in 12 states — including New York, Massachusetts, California and the District of Columbia as well as Toronto, Ontario. Its Rhode Island presence is limited to Brown University, where two cars are available to some 150 members at a parking lot on Brook Street, just south of Waterman.“We’re creating a service that is far better than owning a car in a city,” said Matthew Malloy, vice president of marketing and sales operations.On the West Coast, Seattle-based Flexcar has vehicles available at locations in 8 cities – Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Chicago, Washington and Atlanta.Flexcar currently has more than 700 vehicles — 35 percent of them hybrid Honda Civics or Toyota Priuses — and about 40,000 subscribers, Williams said. He that in cities where public transportation is good, subscribers use the cars to get out of town. In cities, which are spread out and where public transportation is not so good, “it is more convenient to get one to get from one side of town to the other, to visit friends, see movies.”

Car sharing was introduced by Moblility CarSharing Switzerland in 1987 , which has grown to about 70,000 members – compared with fewer than 3,000 in 1993 – and a fleet of nearly 2,000 cars. Indeed, Mobility and Zipcar share honors as the largest car-sharing companies, and with a recent boost of $20 million in lease financing from General Electric, Zipcar is looking to expand. .

“We’re growing 100 percent a year,” said Malloy. “There are more than a million people who could use car-sharing services.”

London-based Streetcar is also expanding rapidly, according to spokeswoman Louise Evans. “We have 7,000 members, 200 cars at 160 locations over three cities (London, Brighton and Southampton),” she said from her office in south London, adding that the company plans to expand to a further seven. “We’re growing 100 percent every six months with a real mixture of professionals, families and students.”

Both Evans and Malloy cited the technology involved in managing their services, with all the information on a member’s flashcard immediately sent to a central file at the end of a trip.They also tout the ecological aspect, with Malloy noting that 40 percent of “Zipsters” decide not to buy a car, or sell their cars after joining, and Streetcar claiming every one of its 200 cars replaces six cars on the street.

Conrad Wagner, vice president of Mobility Switzerland, a division of Mobility Carsharing Switzerland, said the concept of car sharing involved a paradigm shift toward a service economy. “The car companies are still trying to sell you a car, but mobile phone companies sell you a service and throw in the phone,” he said. “Car sharing is the same. It’s moving from a product to a service.”

David Brook, a car-sharing consultant who founded Carsharing Portland in 1998 before selling it to Flexcar in 2003 said car sharing needed to expand out of central cities and improve service. One idea might be making cars available without reservations. “You’d just walk up to a car and use your flash card and drive it away,” he said.

But he said for companies to be able to offer on-demand service, more cars would have to be available. He said the industry was currently in a growth mode with locations having either too many cars not being used enough or too few cars beings used too much. “There’s some limit to how far the industry can grow,” said Kevin McLaughlin from Toronto where he runs Autoshare, a car-sharing company with locations across the city. “Right now it’s confined to large cities and universities. There are limits in the first wave of things.”

“We initially catch all the easy people,” he said, but added that economic and environmental forces such as peak oil production and global warming would continue to spur growth in the industry.

Brook also said car-sharing companies needed to find a cut costs. While conceding that the much touted technology is expensive, he said companies might want to consider buying less expensive cars and cutting deals with car manufacturers. And while there have been some dings and scrapes, Williams said the Flexcar’s vehicles have been looked after very well. “When you might well see the car again, when the next member can easily find out who was using the car, you treat it differently. One area where Brook sees the potential for enormous growth is the Far East.“Maybe it will help (those nations) avoid the mistake the western world has made (regarding) the route to go down to give its citizens a quality of life,” he said. “Maybe they can avoid 8-lane freeways.”

For more information, check out:

http://www.autoshare.com/

carsharingus.blogspot.com/ (includes an excellent video linkabout Streetcar)

www.flexcar.com/

www.carsharing.net/

www.zipcar.com/