Modern transportation behaviors

So I have not owned and operated a car for a few years now in the city of San Francisco. That does not mean that I have done with out a car or personal transportation. I switched from 4 wheels to 2 about 3 years ago and have recently bought a motorcylce that I keep in a garage at my apartment.

Additionally, I have manged to do the research neccessary to find alternatives to car ownership and do many positive things not only for the city of San Francisco's congested streets, but also have drastically cut my transportation budget and contributed to a cleaner safer environment for SF pedestrians, bicyclists and motorists.

I sold my gas guzzling sedan that possessed a rather large footprint when trying to find a parking spot, and did with out a car for awhile using MUNI buses and BART as well as CALTrain. The bay area has envronmentlly leading options for those who need to get around yet do not have a car. Then I heard of City Car Share which is a program of small car rented by the hour with a milage fee of $ .40 per/mile. This is an excellent program for those trips around town to grocery shop, run errands and see the sights. They are always adding new cars to the fleet and have just completed an inventory turn over program that includes new cars such as the Toyota Prius, Mini Cooper and Honda Hybrids as well as the fleet standard Toyota Xa and Xb. The program fails to compete though, when you want to leave the city and take in a weekend outing like scuba diving in Monterey for the day, or visit a client in the Silicon Valley.

For trips such as this there is now a new competitor in town. Flex Car's business model is structured a bit differently and is more accomodating for longer overnight trips to snowboard in Tahoe or sip some Pinot in the wine country. They even have a few cars that are available on the 5 or 7 program, which does not charge you for hours used over the number indicated. So if I reserve a Honda Element which happens to be in the 7 program, I only get charged for 7 hours in the 24 hour time period. The other 17 hours are free.

Both programs have robust online reservation and account management systems. Both programs have gas cards in the glove box that allow for free fillups. Both programs remove the responsibility of auto maintenance. Both programs eliminate the monthly parking ticket line item on your budget and both programs provide numerous and convenient locations in the city and the east bay where they keep as many as 3 vehicles in a pod at a time.

I also have utilized Fox Rentacar down near SFO. For awhile after 9/11, you could rent a car for $14.00 a day. Just hop on BART and zip down to SFO's car rental annex and take a shttle to FOX. They have drastically increased their prices recently, and are now not even competitive with the other major car rental companies.

I know I spend less that $20 per month at the gas station, have a motorcycle insurace bill of $41 per month and average a monthly car sharing bill near $35 per month. All total that is less than $100 for my transport needs, and that includes a whole lot of pleasure on the motorcylce and a whole lot of variety using the car sharing programs.

I figure when I owned and operated a car, it cost me around a $550 per month to maintain and run, whether I used it or not. With my new program of motorcycle and car sharing memberships, I'm much nearer to $96 per month. Pretty good numbers...

www.citycarshare.org
www.flexcar.com
http://www.craigslist.org/mcy/

...and if I wasn't such a modern sustainable guy, I'd be in one of these......breathtaking!