lostarchitect 

Also, you cannot compare the cost for a rental car from a rural location or in the suburbs to what they cost in the city. Rental cars are MUCH more expensive if you rent in the city than if you rent outside of it. In that context Zipcars don't look so expensive, especially when only used for a couple hours.

cvskates

Just to make this more fun, the numbers I'm using are Canadian. $6729 US = $8956 CDN at the current exchange. I know it's not that simple, we're really comparing apples to oranges.

I always like to think of it as paying myself $52 per day to bike to work, then it's especially satisfying.

Leisesturm

Whoa... wait a minute... what do you mean by "another C2G"?? Do you mean you need two separate cars to make one grocery run? Why on earth would that be?? As to the pricing not being comparable to legacy car rentals I disagree. A car rental is a car rental. If Enterprise can rent an economy sedan for $27/dy ($9.99/dy!! on weekends). Without an inititiation fee and yearly subscription then the hourly rental model is the one that needs review. As for the insurance and gas rolled in. Nice bit of social engineering there. Pitch it as a positive and watch people defend what amounts to upsell on the part of C2G. I'll bet good money I can find gas cheaper than their "market rate". Third party insurance as well. Or no insurance if I choose to risk it.

Leisesturm

They are more expensive inside of the city. True. When I lived in Brooklyn I would actually take the train down to Newark, grab the rental and drive back up to Brooklyn. But that's NYC. Its a different beast. Out here in PDX, I sometimes take the train out to Beaverton and get rentals at better rates and without Multnomah county's rental car tax. I just do not find using a car for two hours practical, however. A grocery run like an earlier poster talked about has got to be better performed with a bike and trailer (or panniers)!. Shopping serious enough to need a rental car takes an hour minimum... realization dawns... CrankyOne uses one rental to get to the Whole Foods, turns it in so as to be off the clock and then grabs another to go home... that only works if you get discounts for partial hour rentals. Is that the case? No matter how you slice and dice it. The smart way to use rental cars is as little as possible. Then when it is unavoidable, max out the value of the 24 hour period you have paid for by making multiple trips.

cvskates

He means he ends the trip at whole foods, does his shopping, then loads what he bought into a different Car2Go. He's not simultaneously using two cars.

You don't have to use, or like, or approve of others use of Car2Go. For some people it's just awesome, for others, not so much. I don't care you can rent a car for a whole day cheaper; because I don't want a car for a whole day. I like that I can tap my card, get in, drive 20 blocks, and have the $3.76 charged to my visa. No rental office, no fuss, no muss. Even cheaper than the bus!

The annual Car2Go fee is $2. I'm not sure what you're referring to with "market rate" for fuel, as others have pointed out fuel and insurance are both included in the cost. No social engineering required.

Maybe I'm inferring a lot of negativity where none is intended, but you sure seem down on Car2Go for reasons I can't understand / are nonsensical / don't actually exist.

Leisesturm

Give me some credit. I know that. I am trying to understand why a different car is required for the trip home. Can you just leave the C2G vehicles wherever and whenever you are done with them or do you have to bring them to designated pick-up/drop-off sites? And, yes, I am confusing some of the details with C2G with ZipCar and it does look like C2G have figured out some things (like fractional hour pricing).

tjspiel

There's no guarantee that same car will still be there for the trip home. Someone else can grab it in the meantime. You can reserve a car 30 minutes in advance, but that won't work if you're going be at whole foods longer than that. You can just hold onto the keys and not "end the trip" but you will be charged for that hour that you're holding the car. This is a problem. If you've got several bags worth of groceries, you're not going to want to hunt down a car2go.

The charge is .41 a minute plus a $1 per trip for insurance. There are different pricing levels for 30 minutes, an hour, or a whole day. This is for the Twin Cities. Last year they provided a card you could use to refuel and they would give you free minutes if you took the time to do it. Their app shows you the fuel level of the cars in your area. People would find ones that needed fuel and gas them up just to get the additional minutes. I'm sure having 6 cars being parked in front of the same guy's house wasn't a desirable outcome even if the tanks were full.

Now it looks like you have to pay for any needed gas yourself and send them a picture of the receipt. The way the system is intended to be used though, it's not likely you'd need to get fuel.

They will also "rebalance" the cars as far as where they are parked. I got a bunch of free introductory minutes and over the course of week or two, used them up just getting a feel for the cars and the system. After I burned through my minutes, I noticed the cars would just sort of show up in front of my house overnight. Maybe it was a coincidence, but I think that was intentional and the results of analyzing their trip data. I'd bet anything that heavy users don't usually have to go far to find a car. The cars come to them.

cvskates

I used to do that. 20 free minutes when your commute takes 17 minutes, I got quite a few trips for free

One of my recent disappointments was when Car2Go in Vancouver got rid of that policy. Now their fleet guys fuel the cars, no more free minutes

I've seen them trucking away cars from where I work because so many end up there; not sure where they end up.

CrankyOne

Very true. At this particular Whole Foods (3rd St in Brooklyn) you're almost guaranteed that if the car you came in isn't still there then another will be. It's a very popular way of getting there. If one isn't close then it's Lyft time (Uber has become exceptionally unpopular for both their invasion of privacy and mostly their anti-bicycle statements).

CrankyOne

It'd be interesting to know the monetary and energy/pollution economics of this. I think that overall car share is a great deal, especially if it allows people to go without owning a personal car and encourages them to walk, bike, and transit more.

tjspiel

It's a good question. I've wondered as well. They do the same thing with bike share bikes. I like to think of them as a greener way for people to get around but I'm concerned about how much of that is lost by the fact that the bikes themselves get moved by pickup truck.

CrankyOne

Very different for bikeshare. They can carry about 18 bikes with one truck (and about another 30 on a trailer). The bikes are light so trucks aren't carrying a heavy load. They are rebalancing among numerous locations so can create fairly efficient routes for a single truck and these are getting better each year. From an energy standpoint it is more than offset by people having ridden a bicycle rather than drive a car or bus. Not sure about the monetary side.

CrankyOne

BTW, we've done a bit of study of bikeshare systems and you've one of the best run in Minneapolis. Bill Dossett and his crew have done a great job and folks all around the world look up to them.