dedhed

And the rental company has another car to get their butt to work the next day. They also make you pay insurance up front and raises the rates to cover the insurance increase. They also have lawyers too go after people who damage their vehicles.

Mobile 155

Is it just me are does anyone else see this whole concept as an attempt to ride in a car more often? This doesn’t sound like someone wanting to be car free as much as someone trying to find a way to get to drive a car for as close to free as possible.

Is there an advantage to having a car driving all over the city or county by five or ten people rather that one trip to work or school and then home?

Think about the business plan that buys a vehicle and rents it out to six un-vetted drivers just because they have a drivers license? The same business plan like dockless bicycles and scooters? They are bleeding money.

Want to to rent a car for a short period of time use something like Zip Car. That way you can drive a car to your heart’s content and still get a LCF badge. It doesn’t seem to be about driving or riding in a car it seems to be about owning your own car.

tandempower

If you are a member of a ride/drive/car-share community, you could ride/drive-share to work the next day if your car got stolen/trashed. Nothing that you're saying is unsolvable within the financial framework of ride/drive/car-sharing.

Obviously some people are going to ride/drive more than other people. You can't assume that everyone who uses ride-sharing is going to do so in the same way, according to the same ethics, etc.

There could come a point where ride/drive-sharing is very popular, yet some people will want to do something to get people to ride/drive less because too many people are causing too much car traffic collectively. That's a separate issue.

Yes, less need for parking; not being locked into a multiyear purchase contract for a vehicle; not being locked into insurance payments, etc.

Really it all depends on how many users can share how few cars. If, say, 1000 people share a fleet of 200 or less cars, then they only have to share the costs of those 200 cars. That is why auto workers, investors, etc. are against ride-sharing, etc. because they make money per car they make, service, insure, etc. So they don't want to see the total number of cars on the roads decreasing. Yet that is exactly what would be better for people to reduce their economic burden and move toward greater sustainability.

Why wouldn't there be criteria for getting and maintaining driving privileges?

The only badge we can get for LCF is to collectively reduce the total number of cars in the world. You have to act at the individual level, but business functions at the collective level, so why shouldn't business be used to collectively reduce waste, costs, and unsustainability by sharing resources instead of putting a car in every driveway?

Mobile 155

Who buys the Car TP? Who fills out the paperwork that assures the second driver is insurable? One car going to school or work for even ten or fifteen miles is burning less fuel than one vehicle making six to ten trips to six or ten different places. If the program is successful you will get more cars going more places every day. That is how popular things work.

i still don’t see how someone looking to be “Car Free” can be so interested in finding a way to use a car. There is no way that is car free.

I-Like-To-Bike

Losses on Dockless bicycles and scooters are chump change compared to the drive share/rental/taxi motor vehicle business.

Think about the business plan in use by Uber and Lyft, they are gushing money (losses of BILLIONS of dollars per year) even though they don't don't buy any of the vehicles used for transporting customers, nor do they pay for vehicle maintenance and upkeep.

How much more money will speculators and venture capitalists be willing to lose if and when the "business plan" calls for their scheme to buy and maintain the so-called drive share/rental/taxi vehicles?

badger1

Correct, in all respects.

This entire thread (the assumptions buried in the original post) amounts to a bunch of special pleading that has absolutely nothing to do with either LCF or LCL.

The OP here constantly complains that folks who, he/she claims, are proponents of or 'special agents' of Big Auto shouldn't be on here (the LCF sub-forum), and yet here we are ... talking about the utilization of and access to personal motorized vehicles.

It is ridiculous. You are correct: the whole thrust of this op/thread is to propose utterly unrealistic speculations about how people in (presumably) the op's situation can have access to cars without the fiscal means that enable and the fiscal responsibility that necessarily goes with that access. Putting it another way: 'how can "I" get other people to foot the bill for me to drive when I want to.'

Remarkably similar to the requests for little laundromats on hiking trails, inner-city water access, and so on: always someone else is to foot the bill to enable some individuals to live a 'pure' life.

Mobile 155

As I thought.

pedex

It also has been hashed out and rehashed a bazillion times yet TP keeps coming back despite it all being answered or debunked too many times to count.

radroad

You beg for replies since no one was interested, you get exactly ONE reply and then you complain about it.

If you don't like the facts, then don't even bother with the thread.

If you want a driver share business, start one.

Machka 

Yeah, I'm not sure why we're talking about driving options in a car free forum.

Wouldn't it be nicer to talk about walking or cycling somewhere? Individually. Without sharing anything.


Someone still got to park the cars somewhere.
Someone has to pay for the vehicle.
Someone has to fork out a whole lot for insurance.

--------------------------------------------------------

I drive on the weekends.

During the week, I use a combination of public transportation and walking. I end up walking about 25 km/week, most of which is transportation walking.

How about you?

tandempower

Who buys the cars for a car-share? Who buys them for a rental car franchize? Who buys them for a delivery service?

I think the ride-share app has requirements for drivers. If driver's a privately insured, then they would just have to have insurance that allows other drivers to drive their vehicles, maybe because those drivers are also insured with the same insurance company, for example.

The challenge is to minimize/eliminate driving that doesn't advance someone along their journey, e.g. backtracking and driving far to pick up the next ride. If a ride-share app can coordinate 10 different rides within the same journey, and 2 or 3 different drivers take over in the course of that journey, then one car has served multiple people instead of just one or two, and thus only one parking spot is needed as well as one 'slot' on the roads for all those people. Of course using transit is even more efficient, but if people are going to drive instead of using transit, then consolidating vehicle trips would at least reduce the number of vehicles on the roads.

It's more car-free than owning and driving a personal automobile dedicated only to yourself.

Why do you think share vehicles are inherently more prone to loss than other vehicle usage models? Is there a reason besides vandalism and other negative/obstructive actions against them?

If 200 cars are shared among 1000 ride/drive-share participants, they still have to foot the costs, but those costs are 1/5 of what would be incurred by 1000 people owning/driving 1000 cars.

The same reason you talk about deliveries that involve motor vehicles: because there are times when you might need a ride because you don't own a car.

Mobile 155

TP I know this is almost hopeless but I will take a shot. Many of the people posting here have experience in business or finance or distribution and even transportation. In their working and personal experience they have heard many business plans and motives for the plan. Sometimes those plans are simply not worth the investment even if the person or persons presenting the plans believe in them.

More than the simple plan investors can often see the motives for the plan. If the motive of the plan is to make car travel as cheep as possible it is still promoting car travel. So they will compare the plan to others built on the same business model. Dockless bikes and dockless scoters come to mind.

Now come the cold water splash of reality. Using statements like people can be persuaded to do or trained to do something and that will make it work isn’t in itself reason for investment. The question will be asked if there is an example of a business plan where people call up a ride in a car and each take a turn driving to a destination of their choice leaving the vehicle somewhere after the last use?

If if there is no example of such a business plan then words like, people could or, people should are reasons to reject such plans. The reason for this is because of what people do. Go to a local rental yard and look at rental equipment and see how people treat such equipment. People do not take the same care of rental equipment or even rental cars or bicycles or motorcycles as they do something they are invested in.

It isn’t vandalism or a conspiracy that makes something fail as much as a bad plan. Planning on a rental system that doesn’t pay back the investment before the tax exemption runs out is not a good plan.


And promoting car in a car free forum isn’t more car free.

tandempower

There is a bias among business people against cheapness, because they want money. That is contrary to what business is supposed to be, i.e. people willing to pursue any business model that will make money, regardless of whether it takes money away from other businesses or the economy as a whole.

The reality is that sharing creates spending opportunities that wouldn't exist if vehicles must be owned, maintained, insured, etc. by individuals individually. Sharing machines is economically efficient. That's why everyone doesn't own their own bulldozer, crane, or other large industrial machinery. It just so happens that some clever-but-shortsighted people in the last century developed the idea that if everyone bought a car, that would create a lot of economic growth and jobs. It did, but it pushed the economy to a point where there is only room for recession because money and resources are pushed to the limit. We can reset the economy to make room for growth again, but doing so means using new technologies like smartphones and other IT to use resources more efficiently. Sharing vehicles probably holds the most potential in this regard, because so much land is wasted on mutli-lane roads/highways and parking.

Plenty of examples. What do you think people do with rental cars at night? Buses? Service vans? Taxis?

Your theory should be tested in practice. If some ride-share drivers just continue to only drive their own vehicles and not share them with other rider-drivers, there will be the possibility of comparison. You could also compare how taxi drivers treat their vehicles compared with owner-operators who participate in ride-sharing.

Vandalism is what scares away investors from scooter/bike shares. With ride-sharing it's news of horror stories, which coincidentally never get published about taxis, maybe because nothing bad ever happens on a taxi ride

It just makes it easier to live without owning a car if you can easily and affordably get a ride when you need it. The reason so many people own cars and drive everywhere is because they are conditioned to think it's the only possibility. Ride-sharing is about overcoming that conditioning.

Mobile 155

I knew it was hopeless. My bad. I do know how rental cars work. They are bought, rented, maintained and inspected each time they are used. They also charge enough to pay for the vehicle before it is no longer a deductible asset.

All vehicles are owned, insured and maintained by someone. And if they are owned by a company they are used to make a profit.
Feel free to dream of getting someone else to purchase and insure a vehicle to be used by someone or several someone’s that don’t want to buy and insure their own vehicle. I will however wager a mass transit bus will never be picked up by an employee and then have passengers take turns driving it from stop to stop till the last one gets home and parks it.

I have to prove nothing society proves my contentions for me. Promoting cars for you benefit is however not promoting being free from cars. No matter how you spin it.


Keep dreaming your dream and let’s us know when they come to fruition. I will reserve holding my breath.

badger1

Correct.

The key is to be found here: "It just makes it easier to live without owning a car if you can easily and affordably get a ride when you need it."

In other words, this thread never did have, and still has, nothing whatsoever to do with 'Living Car Free'.

In effect, this thread acknowledges -- oddly enough -- that personal motor vehicles are a 'fact of life' in modern societies, and so the question underlying it is not so much how to reduce/eliminate the presence of personal motor vehicles in 'our' daily lives, but rather how 'we' can have ready access to personal motor vehicles while a) not bearing the financial burden and responsibilities of actually owning one and b) providing a somewhat Sophistic 'moral' justification for using one. That enviro-moral justification for the evasion of fiscal responsibility/liability is, of course, the point.

All quite amusing, really, and fun to follow.

Mobile 155

I totally agree. I just have a difficult time getting to the core reason for calling plans like these car free. It reminds me of working with people with ADHD or even Autism. How do we communicate with someone with a totally different thought process even if they are speaking the same language?

I should just give up and watch others deal with the issues. If the solution to point to point door to door access to transportation is the car, even if it is a borrowed or rented car then living car free isn’t what someone is looking for.

Machka 

Rental car franchises and delivery services are companies. They buy vehicles, rent them to people who meet certain qualifications and who are willing to pay a decent amount of money up front. They have special business insurance on everything and probably quite a lot of insurance.

Go rent a vehicle ... you'll begin to understand what happens during the rental process.

With private insurance, you can set it up to allow other drivers to drive, but often your insurance plan won't allow just any other driver to drive ... it will be designated drivers like both partners in a couple. If you allow just anyone to drive, I would imagine insurance prices would rise.

You see ... people who own things often have an increased desire to protect those things. If a person has purchased a vehicle and put a sizeable sum of money into the vehicle, chances are they want to take care of that vehicle so that their money wasn't wasted.

Whereas, if the vehicle is just something that you're going to drive from here to there and someone else owns it ... why bother taking care with that vehicle?




We have our groceries delivered. We don't drive to the store, take up a parking space and drive home again along with hundreds of others. Instead, one delivery vehicle does a planned and efficient route to everyone who is having their groceries delivered.

With delivery, we don't need to drive, own a vehicle, worry about insurance, etc.

Machka 

And that's OK too.

There are times when living car free doesn't make sense for a person.

Mobile 155

We have agreed on this position before. It would be OK if someone didn’t try to contend that getting more people in cars was advancing car free.
In this case I feel I got dragged down a rabbit hole. I don’t see the proposed car share as car free but rather trying to get a free ride in a car. But that is simply my opinion. I guess I should just let it go.

Machka 

Yes ... me too.

I have complained a little when both Rowan and I were unable to drive (I had a suspected hip fracture) and the nearest bus stop to the MRI place was about 500 metres away. On those fortunately rare occasions, I wouldn't mind some sort of free shuttle from the bus to the MRI place. But I dealt with it by using a taxi for some of the journey. In the 6 years we have lived here, I've had to use a taxi maybe a half a dozen times. Most of the rest of the time, public transportation works.

Otherwise, if people are at all able-bodied, I think they should be encouraged into active transportation whenever possible ... walking, cycling, etc. ... even for just a portion of the journey.

Machka 

Here's a thread you might want to participate in ...


https://www.bikeforums.net/general-c...ness-idea.html

tandempower

Right, but a share-system is not for profit, nor is it even a non-profit company designed to pay out revenues without declaring profit. It is a method for sharing property among multiple users so that the downtime and other waste of appliance ownership can be turned into cost-savings for users.

Why would you pay for someone else to profit from you sharing a vehicle with other users unless you have to? And if you do have to pay out some profit in order to do so, why would you want to pay more than necessary?

Well, it's really just a question of taking the monthly costs of vehicle ownership and dividing by 30 to see how much you need to make per day to break even. It you pay out $600/month, you have to make $20/day to cover your expenses. That's ten rides per day at $2/ride, assuming you just want to partake in the share system and not make profit.

Now, once you start factoring in things like who has to take the vehicle for service and repairs, fuel it, etc. things get trickier. Such things are unpaid labor that vehicle owners do for themselves without paying anyone else to do them, so they don't get factored into the cost of car ownership, but of course they are part of it.

Still, if you look at ride-share prices, they are more than necessary to cover the expenses of vehicle ownership. In fact, they are so high that drivers are treating ride-sharing like a job, and the corporate people also seem to be doing pretty well. So there is definitely room for profit, and there is room for more profit if you incorporate ride-drive sharing into the system, because then people will drive for a discount instead of expecting pay, i.e. because they are getting a ride as they drive.

So let's say a ride-share driver gives 10 rides per day at an average of $10/ride and makes $100. If that $100/day goes to the vehicle instead of its driver, that's $3000/month. If you think provide a 50% discount on rides for passengers when they drive, that amount may go down some, but then you don't have to pay a driver, and so if you're an independent contractor, that frees your time up to go do something else for money besides driving.

It just depends on how much people use ride/drive-sharing. If they use it for every trip, the same as if they were driving, then it wouldn't make the world any more car-free. If, however, they use it as part of a broader 'transportation diet' that includes transit, biking, walking, etc. then they could cut their car usage way down.

One problem with personal car ownership is that once you are paying to buy, maintain, and insure a vehicle, you can't redirect that money for other things like biking, transit, ride-sharing, or whatever. However, if you could essentially rent out your car when you're not using it, you get money back for driving less, which free up your money for other things, like biking, transit, ride-sharing, or whatever.

FiftySix

Tandempower, now that you've discussed it thoroughly, maybe it's time for you to try it yourself. Just on a smaller scale.

Contact your friends and neighbors and try this experiment with a electric bicycle. Something worth about $3 to $5K USD. Basically, a bicycle that no one might buy for themselves, but with everyone pitching in together the bike could be obtained and shared by the group.

Come up with a pay to ride system that you envision. Have the bike maintained and repaired by the local bicycle shop with funds from the share payments.

Let us know how it goes. Short term and long term.

tandempower

The reason why share companies have value is because they have established a network of participants. Before Uber or Lyft existed, you could post ride ads on Craiglist and I'm sure people got rides sometimes, especially if it was planned well in advance or if it was for something common, like a weekend trip between major cities within a region.


But to coordinate riding and driving in an efficient way so that it is possible to more-or-less spontaneously hitch a ride with someone for a few blocks or miles and not have a plan for later, but then spontaneously get another ride then; you need a working network of active users.


Uber came up with the idea of surge-pricing and variable pricing generally to fill in the gaps for users. It is little solutions like these that make a larger system work. Adding 'drive share' to an existing ride-share system is another such idea; i.e. one that allows users to also be drivers and for vehicles to continue to serve the network after the vehicle owner has left the vehicle.


I agree with many of the posts here that people take better care of their appliances when they own them personally; and that it wouldn't be comforting to get out of your personal vehicle and hand it over to some other driver; but of course this is the challenge for ride-sharing to overcome. I think it is doable by some combination of insurance and compensation. If you can be assured that your car will be fixed or replaced if it is damaged, then many people wouldn't mind letting others drive as ride/drive-share users. Obviously part of the ride-share app's functions is to screen drivers and riders, so you would know that whoever was taking over the wheel when you left your vehicle would follow the rules of the ride-share system.

bbbean 

Ride sharing is just a new way to say taxi. Nothing new about hiring someone to take you someplace, regardless of whether its in a car, bus, train, plane, rickshaw, or on a horse.