I’m twenty-nine years old. I’m originally from Boston, Massachusetts. I went to Antioch College and got really interested there in environmentalism. I was a communications major and thought a lot about social change from the point of view of improving the environment. I came to City CarShare because I’m a city lover and because I really enjoy walking and bicycling and always took MUNI. Increasingly, I felt concerned about pedestrian deaths, pollution from automobiles and saw the automobile as a big problem that needed creative solutions. I read about car sharing and how it was really successful in Europe, especially in Switzerland, and talked with other friends, other environmentalists, city planners, transit activists about the possibility of bringing car sharing into an American context. We all felt that if car sharing was going to work anywhere in the U.S., it would work in San Francisco and I think that’s probably going to prove true.

Prior to this I worked for a non-profit called the Neighborhood Park Council. The mission of the organization was to organize friends groups around all of the urban parks in San Francisco to cultivate a political force for the parks that would increase resources and community responsibility for urban open space. It prepared me for this work, which is a lot of community organizing as well.

I founded the San Francscio version of CarShare along with my Co-Director, Kate White and Gabriel Metcalf. We’d all three read about the idea being so successful in Europe and then heard it had come successfully to Canada. We just started to talk about what it would take to bring it to an American context. The interesting thing about the European and Canadian models is that the organizations were run on an honor system. When you join CarShare, you are given a key that works to all of the cars. When you take a trip, you write down the mileage at the end of your trip. One of the things we thought about bringing it to the U.S. was that it had to be a lot more secure than that. It had to be more automated and through meeting other people in the city, we started to meet people who could help us with that translation. It just started to seem more and more possible. Being that San Francisco is so close to the Silicon Valley and there’s such a rich culture of technological advance in a human context, it seemed more and more possible that we could create a car sharing program that could work in a big city.

I think a lot of the energy and excitement around the dot-com industry was present with our project. This was great because we’re asking people to work for us as volunteers or at non-profit rates and in some ways, because of the vision, we make sacrifices in different ways and I think that it might have even brought an extra intensity because of the excitement of making a change in the city. It helped us a great deal with finding experts who were willing to work outrageous hours after work to make this happen.

I never expected in my life to be someone who would have a lot of money. I was more interested in work that was socially meaningful. Everyone once in a while when a big credit card bill comes, I think about it but in a broader sense, I don’t think I’d be happy at an average dot-com job.

We’ve raised about $1.1 Million dollars from environmental foundations, individuals, and the Federal Department of Transportation. We’ve only been open for two and a half weeks now, offering car sharing services to people less than a month. We’ve been overwhelmed with the response.

There is a network of vehicles located around the city. People who join can check cars out for anywhere from an hour to a week. There’s no cap on the time you can use it. In a lot of ways, it’s useful to be able to check a car out for an hour or an hour and a half for short errands. You pay based on how much you drive. The more you drive, the more you pay. It’s $2.50 an hour and $.45 per mile. All of the costs associated with car ownership are handled by my organization. We pay for gasoline, insurance, maintenance, the parking spaces where the cars live. There’s a gas card that accompanies the car that members are instructed to learn how to use. They’re blocked from letting people buy cigarettes and Cheetos. We just ask people to be respectful and not bring the cars back empty.

We’ve had close to 200 people sign up, paying a $300 deposit, which is refundable when you leave. Then it’s $10 per month plus the usage fees. We have four locations around the city with more opening. They’re at North beach Garage on Vallejo Street, Golden Gateway Garage at Clay and Battery, Performing Arts Garage at Grove and Gough, and the Fifth and Mission Garage. We’re working very hard to open new locations soon. The next two months, we expect to open at Davies Medical Center in the Duboce Triange (They donated free spaces to us) and in the Mission, Haight and South Beach neighborhoods as well.

We’re so excited about the idea of hooking up with the ferry system. People who ride the ferries are already educated about the pleasures of not having to commute every day by car. Probably, sometimes they do have to commute in by car because they have a meeting or something that they have to get to. Car sharing would allow them more time to relax on the boat and if they needed a car during the day at work, we could provide them a car when they needed it.

For more information contact:

San Francisco City Car Share

953 Mission St #121

San Francisco, CA 94103

415/995-8588

www.sfcarshare.org