Take that Zipcar

Now since it seems that Zipcar won't expand it's market in Baltimore beyond Johns Hopkins University and Goucher College, Bmore is going to just go around Zipcar and create it's on car sharing organization. Take that! Seeing as Zipcar has been a great success in markets like Washington DC and Philadelphia, why wouldn't they want to start up more pods here? Especially in a city whose public and rapid transit system is far less suited for people looking to get around. Car sharing would be a great option here, and it definitely is a loss for Zipcar.

On the good side of this is that Baltimore gets to create its own non-profit car sharing system on the lines of PhillyCarShare (http://www.phillycarshare.org/). The start up date hasn't been set yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was something in the not-to-distant future. We definitely need another option here in Bmore, and this will fill a great void. Baltimore is a city where you need a car to get to practically anything, and a car sharing system will help us do without. For those people who don't want to have the hassle of owning a car, with insurance, payments, and gas on top of it, this will be a great alternative.

Imagine being able to pick up a car for a few hours, go to the supermarket and do some errands, then return the car at a pod. If they are spaced frequently around neighborhoods and downtown the walk would be easy to get one. If they focus some pods around Metro, Light Rail, and Bus transportation centers, then we got something good going on. Plus they want to get a lot of hybrids, so environmentally they will be better, and hopefully get more individual cars off the street.

Let's hope they can get this up and running soon. We all could use a better alternative these days! (Maybe a bike sharing program in the future?)

Comments

  1. AnonymousNovember 22, 2009 at 2:08 PM

    I like the idea. How long do we have to wait?

    ReplyDelete

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