Try car sharing

Need a car but don’t want to buy one? Community car sharing organizations provide access to a car and your membership fee covers gas, maintenance and insurance. Many companies such as Flexcar - offer low emission or hybrid cars too! Also, see ZipCar.

Background Information

Carsharing is a system where a fleet of cars (or other vehicles) is jointly-owned by the users in distinction from car rental or cars in private ownership. The users are organized as a democratically-controlled company, public agency, cooperative, ad hoc grouping. The fleet is made available for use by members of the carshare group in a wide variety of ways. The costs and troubles of vehicle purchase, ownership and maintenance are transferred to a central organizer (the Carshare Operator or more familiarly CSO). It has been around in various forms for more than half a century, but it is only in the last decade that it has begun to gather force as a viable alternative to car ownership—for some people and some places. Today there are more than six hundred cities in the world where people can carshare.[1]

The term carsharing is also used for carpooling or ride sharing some places.

As is often the case with innovations that spring up more or less spontaneously in different parts of the world, operations are organized in many different ways in different places, according to the objectives of the organizers and users. A small informal start-up may have only one shared car, and only a handful of sharers. In the larger services that are increasingly coming into existence, participants are typically city-dwellers whose transportation needs are largely met by public transit, walking, or cycling.

Carsharing is not only a way for individuals or groups to meet their specific mobility requirements, but it is also taking its place as a key part of what is now increasingly being called the New Mobility Agenda, which combines Transportation Demand Management (TDM) strategies and measures for containing, channeling and limiting private car traffic in cities, with support of a “bouquet” of alternative transportation arrangements. These include utility cycling, walking, public space improvement, electronic substitutes for travel (such as telework, telecommuting or e-work) and a variety of shared and public transport strategies. Carsharing has been called “the missing link”[citation needed] of the New Mobility Agenda, insofar as it permits people to give up their cars and in the process make fuller use of these other ways of getting around in cities.