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ChineseZero, Zilch, Zip: Number of Zipcars in Los Angeles.
Unless they live on-campus at a local university (USC, UCLA, Pomona), Angelenos now have no car-sharing options available to them. Prior to 2008, Flexcar members in Culver City, Downtown, Hollywood, West Hollywood, Pasadena, Santa Monica, Venice, and Wilshire Center had access to a large number of vehicles. However, 2008 brought the anticipated/dreaded merger with rival Zipcar, and as CurbedLA reports, the outcome of the merger is a worst-case-scenario come true. Here is an email that many Flexcar members turned Zipcar members received (apparently I was not on the mailing list):
Car sharing is an evolving category of transportation, and we are working hard to pioneer the industry. We are constantly learning more about the best way to operate our service, and sometimes what we learn results in a tough decision.
In Southern California, we have decided to remove our vehicles from areas outside of the universities we serve (cars will remain at UCLA, USC, Pomona, UCSB, UCSD and UCI).
This was a difficult decision for us, and we understand it may present significant inconvenience for you. We apologize for that.
Reservations for all affected locations have been canceled and fully credited. Further, we have refunded annual membership fees for all members who paid an annual fee within the past nine months. Your refund will appear in your account automatically. If you have questions about your refund, please contact us at info@zipcar.com.
We realize that you recently activated your Zipcard. We’d like to encourage you to use it by placing a *new* $25 driving credit into your account. Hopefully, you’ll reserve a vehicle at one of our university locations in Southern California or in any other city where we provide service. If you have further questions, do not hesitate to contact us at info@zipcar.com.
The team at Zipcar
Ummm… no.
Clearly this is likely the result of market forces at play and the fact that only a small minority in our car-centric city would ever require a car-sharing service, but still, for those who used Flexcar and for those who felt that it had the potential to encourage people to go car-free by offering a “life-line”, this news sucks.
The delivery of the news could not be any worse either. Members have been in the dark about the merger since it was first announced in October 2007, and as 2008 approached and Zipcards were mailed out and subsequently activated, members pondered when they could once again take out a car. Well members need not wonder any longer, because through randomly sent emails and watchful blogs (of course no press release from Zipcar or mention on their website), we now know the fate of the car-sharing service many of us relied on. How trite our worries about increased hourly rates and exorbitant late fees now seem in the face of total service abandonment.
Clearly car-sharing is a speculative venture, but at least Flexcar was trying. They continually added cars and with time I think more and more people would have joined. But now that speculative future is impossible. Zipcar has decided that Los Angeles is a lost cause. The only place Zipcar sees a potential market for car-sharing is in the dorms of USC, offering 8 stupidly named vehicles (“Muranaka”, “Younce”, “Mcelhattan”, etc.) for those pathetic few coeds whose parents wouldn’t allow them the Beamer their freshman year.
What’s even more depressing to me is what this says about Los Angeles and the future of alternative transportation in this city. This city that prides itself on its liberalism and staunch standards of healthiness and eco-living can’t even muster up the cajones to support one of the brightest ideas in alternative transportation and one that lets them drive the godforsaken cars they claim to love. Because in the end that’s what this is all about. As much as I’d like to say that Zipcar is just an evil company trying to screw us all, I can’t, because they aren’t taking the cars from Chicago, they aren’t taking the cars from Boston. In those cities people have to make their reservations far in advance, whereas in Los Angeles I could usually make a reservation minutes before I was leaving. Sure it made things easy, but it also meant that no one was using the service. Could/should Zipcar try harder to get the car-sharing message out before they cancel the service? Hell yes. But will it make a difference to car-addicted Angelenos? My answer to that question is nowhere near as confident.
Discussion
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Please keep discussions civil: exercise Troll Controll.
As someone put it to me, there’s a reason why Zipcar is surviving as a business and Flexcar did not.
Tough break for LA. Hopefully the programs at the Universities will grow.
Wow… I used Flexcar for my downtown office and staff. It was a great system and allowed our office to ride transit to work yet still make meetings throughout the southland in an efficient manner.
This is really upsetting!
Damn. I used Flexcar’s downtown locations all the time. I live 1 mile from downtown and would bike down to the cars when I needed one. I dared to dream that Zipcar would add more cars even closer to my house and decided to swallow the substantially higher rates (2x!) and hoped for the best.
I activated my zipcard yesterday and saw that all the old Flexcar locations had been removed. I hoped that would be temporary, but now I know it’s not. I’ll be canceling my zipcar membership today and start car shopping. And I think this totally sucks.
You need to ask what about La makes a flexicar (generic) unprofitable? There is a hint in the fact that they remain in urban universities. There’s another hint in the phrase “car addicted Angelenos” which isn’t true but explains the problem. To complete the picture “jeffro” says he is buying a car even though that sucks.
If Metro fares were doubled would FlexCar thrive? Answer honestly.
Actually that question was answered in the post:
If you own a car it’s unlikely you’re going to use a car-sharing service.
No. Honestly.
Fred, you miss my points. LA is not particularly car centric. I’d be glad to entertain any data to the contrary. That is a myth at least as far as it goes.
Problem is LA is not ‘nodal’ on a walkable basis but rather is nodal on an autocentric scale. Megablocks of mono-use land designations that generate continious congestion rather than mixed use spot intensity that generates variable congestion.
Let’s put it this way Rob, if it’s centered on anything it’s on the car. It may not be Phoenix or Orlando or any younger city in terms of it’s car “centricness”, but it’s certainly not a transit-centric or pedestrian-centric city.
You admit so yourself in your second paragraph:
No, Fred. LA is the transit leader of the post automobilia cities. “We” use the most and spend the most public funds to do that. Flexicars are not ever going to compete with 15¢ on the dollar transit. Flexicars could make money hand over fist if we were offering 40¢ on the dollar transit rides.
If I had given out free candles lightbulbs would never have been invented.
But the Flexcars aren’t competing with the buses and trains, they are competing with the cars. That’s why Jefro is getting a car now.
Maybe I’m crazy, but I’d say most Flexcar members are transit users and most car owners are not Flexcar members. In cities where Flexcars are very popular and the business model works it’s not because those cities have a weak or lightly subsidized transit system.
Carsharing is not meant to replace public transit, it’s meant to supplement it.
agreed, fred. public trans gets you close, rideshare takes you the rest of the way. well, in theory at least.
Fred look at the places where Fexicars are doing okay and then look at their transit fare structures in those places. Tell me which one you wish to adopt for LA.
I understand the huge hurdle transit faces with the high sunk costs and low marginal costs of POVs. Living with that reality however makes it important to have transit users acknowledge the value of the public resource they are consuming. That means higher fares. Transit and transit -like alternatives to the POV are struggling not because POVs are subsidized but because transit is subsidized.
and the oscar goes to…
please man, give me a break. flexcar/zipcar existed for many people like me to take us places that buses and trains could not. it was my third choice.
bikes come first, public transit second, and rideshares came third.
the cost of a train-ride had absolutely zero impact on whether or not i took out a flexcar.
but anyway, thanks for the entertainment. it’s good for a laugh.
Matt, your effusive pronouncements from the less than 2% crowd are given their full weight and then some. The other 98% aren’t laughing. I’m not laughing not only because you are being impolite but because it hurts transit advocacy to have people who think it is acceptable to be this impolite. Transit exists at the sufferance of of non-transit users. Just a reality. Biting the heand is not a wise course.
I have been considering going car-ownership free in recent times, and the availability of car sharing is one of the factors. The car sharing service would fill in places between public transit and longer trips in rental cars (which the latter is quite rare for me). There are times when I need to get to work at night (ie between 11p and 6a) in emergency type situations, and there isn’t any OWL service going to my work. Car sharing would have filled in perfectly for this type of situation, and also for those cases where I need to go somewhere that transit doesn’t.
As long as I own and pay insurance on a car, there is no reason for me to use a car sharing service (and considering I have a low mileage 2004 car, there’s basically no reason at all). It also wouldn’t be practical to use a car sharing service instead of public transit (it would be more practical at that point to just own a car).
yeah i soon as i posted that, i regretted it. truth. i marked myself down too. but i still feel what i wrote.
i’m just a little cranky about that whole situation. the loss of car-sharing in LA hurts me and my car-free peers.
but yeah, ignore me, and i’ll go back to doing same for you.
“Apologies” like that I can live without.
Like I said elsewhere, flexicars have to have a market niche twixt transit and autos. Fortunately autos have become much more expensive recently but unfortunately transit is using that to increase subsidies doing more harm than the auto ownership costs are helping. Did anyone catch the Metro live chat Wednesday? Summary; much more money for transit from any funding source except fares. Bread & circuses.
We know you dislike the subsidies transit gets. I could agree. But it’s irrelevant to the success or failure of Flexcars. You know it, I know it. It’s great you want to hammer your point home in every post that transit is heavily subsidized and that it’s just not fair, but please don’t try to correlate that fact with things it doesn’t really effect.
For example:
You might as well say “look at the places where Flexcars are doing okay and look at look how cold their winters are”. It’s likely true that most places where Flexcar is successful have significantly colder winters than Los Angeles, but is that why Flexcar doesn’t work in L.A.? Of course not.
Simply put: Flexcar doesn’t work in LA because the majority of the population owns their own cars, and the minority than doesn’t does so because they are poor. Only a super-minority does not own a car by choice.
And yes, I know in your dream world transit would receive no subsidies and people would have to choose between expensive cars, expensive transit, and expensive Flexcars, and “unsubsidized” POV’s would win win win, but that’s just not the reality right now.
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