Most of us have rented a car while on a business trip or a vacation. You get the keys, the car smells a little funny, sometimes you walk solemnly around the car first with the rental agent and note all the nicks, dings, and dents (that way you get credit only for the ones you add). You drive around, refill the gas tank, and drop off the car a day or two later for the next person to use.

Car sharing is something like this, except that you’d use the car only for a couple of hours near where you live—and (ideally) you wouldn’t actually own your own car. This practice, like many other technological and social innovations, is more prevalent outside the United States than within it. One car-sharing cooperative in Switzerland—available in all villages with a population over 2,000—accounts for 2% of passenger travel in the whole country (recall that in Southern California, the sum total of all our public transit use doesn’t amount to much more than this).

Zipcar, headquartered near Boston, claims to be the world’s largest car-sharing company. According to a study the company did earlier this year, the best candidate cities for car sharing have “high population density, extensive public transit systems and a relatively high burden of car ownership. Cities with less expensive parking, lower education attainment levels and higher vehicle ownership rates offer a less conducive business environment for car-sharing.” My parents lived in Manhattan for a good decade or more without bothering to own a car, though they never car-shared. To visit friends in Connecticut, they’d rent.

In recent years, Zipcar has developed its business on college campuses, finding a comfortable niche serving students and other customers who need cars for short stints. The company also integrates with popular technology. A new iPhone app lets customers find and reserve cars, lock and unlock them—even honk the horn. The company estimates that car-sharing membership, in lieu of car ownership, substantially reduces the cost of a college education.

Most of us tend to think of the cost of driving in terms of the cost of fuel, first, closely followed by the car payment. But there are also maintenance, parking, registration, and insurance costs, even the occasional toll. Some drivers choose to car share, rather than own, to avoid the entire range of auto costs. Just as an example, Zipcar charges $25 to join, $50 a year for membership, and rates starting at $8 an hour or $66 a weekday to drive – including gas, insurance, and 180 miles per day. You may do your own math. To refuel the car, you use a gas card that’s kept inside the vehicle.

'Zipcar maintains five cars in Long Beach, four on the campus of Cal State, along with groups of cars in downtown Los Angeles and in the Westwood area. Other companies have expressed interest in placing shared cars in Long Beach neighborhoods, and I hope they do. To further reduce emissions, there’s no reason shared car fleets couldn’t be mostly (or all) electric, since trips are typically short. Long Beach’s draft Sustainable City Action Plan lists car-sharing among its suggested strategies. With state regulations continuing to require reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, this is an option we should support.

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