For about the last twenty years, my wife and I have had a pretty simple rule:
if we don't need to drive to work, we don't need to own a car.
This was pretty easy when we lived in central London,
because the public transit system was so exceptional.
But in other cities, like Toronto, public transit and cycling could only take
us so far, because the few walkable parts of Toronto
are surrounded by a sprawling suburban wasteland
that is only accessible by car.
And of course we also needed a car because intercity passenger trains
suck so much in Canada.
So in a city that’s designed incorrectly, a car will sometimes be necessary,
and for that, we would rely on carsharing.
In my experience, people don't understand
just how easy carshare programs have become.
You literally open the app, choose a car, and you can be driving in less than 5 minutes.
It’s so easy it’s ridiculous. But I’ll talk about that in more detail,
later in this video.
When talking about carshare, most people seem to think it’s like a rental
car, and they associate it with the horrible experience
of renting a car while on vacation.
And let's face it, renting a car sucks. You have to book it in advance,
you usually have to physically go to the rental car agency,
and when you get there, you'll end up waiting in line
just so that you can go talk to some person who will type in all of your information
into a computer even though you already did it online.
And then they’ll tell you they don’t actually have the car you reserved,
but they’ll provide you with a “free upgrade” to a crappy SUV that consumes
twice as much gas.
So when people think about not owning a car they usually
think about this rental car process and how painful it is.
But that's not the way modern carshare works.
Carsharing has been around for a long time,
possibly as far back as the 1940s.
There was even an all-electric carsharing service
called Witkar that was launched in Amsterdam
in 1974. Talk about being ahead of their time.
We signed up for our first carshare service in 2003,
when we joined AutoShare, in Toronto.
Back then, the service was really basic: we were given a key to a lockbox
that contained the keys to a car and we booked our time slots
using a 1990s-style website. Keeping track of mileage and fuel
was entirely paper based, but the concept worked well enough.
These days however, all carshare systems are app-based,
and you can do everything from booking the car to unlocking the doors,
all from your smartphone.
Today there are many different carshare programs available,
but generally they can be classified into two groups,
what I’m calling fixed and free-floating.
They both have their own advantages and disadvantages,
so we maintain memberships with several different services.
The oldest type of car sharing program
is the fixed kind, and our service in Toronto
is like this.
This is where cars are parked throughout the city
in fixed locations. With this kind of design,
you start to get used to where the cars are in your
neighbourhood, and what kind of cars are available.
After a while we started to settle into using our favourite cars,
and admittedly, it was nice to get a familiar car that always remembered
our Bluetooth connections.
In a fixed carshare system, you typically need to book
your time slot in advance, and you have to return it
back to the place where you picked it up.
This makes it difficult to use a car spontaneously,
but it has the benefit of ensuring that your car is there
when you’ve booked it.
So in this sense, they’re like traditional rental cars,
but with many more locations and you never need to wait in line
or speak to an employee to get your car.
A big benefit of fixed carshare is that they typically have
lots of different kinds of cars and vans. So you can take whichever vehicle
you need for the trip you're taking. When people used to ask us what
kind of car we owned, we used to joke that we had
a fleet of them.
And this is ridiculously useful.
If I was just driving somewhere by myself, or with a few other people,
I would get a small fuel efficient car that's cheap and easy to drive.
But if I had to go buy, say, a sheet of plywood
or move a bunch of large items, I could get a cargo van like this one
that fits everything perfectly.
It always made me laugh while easily loading
my carshare cargo van outside of the hardware store,
and seeing other people in the parking lot trying to squeeze
a bunch of oversized stuff into their crappy SUV
that holds way less than they think it does.
So here they are, driving around in this bloated
piece of garbage vehicle for every trip, everywhere they go,
and the one time they actually need it, it's not big enough.
Carshare solves that problem. So even when we owned our own cars,
we still kept our carshare services active, to maintain access
to the fleet of cars and vans when we needed them.
So carshare doesn't just let people go car-free,
it also lets two car households become single-car households,
and makes it easier for people to buy smaller, cheaper vehicles, too.
The other type of carshare service is what I call the free-floating kind,
and it seems to be the way that most new app-based carshare services work.
Free-floating carshare means that cars can be parked almost anywhere;
you don’t need to book them in advance, and you can return them
wherever it’s convenient. These systems are ideal for
spontaneous trips, and they allow you to take
one-way trips as well.
Instead of being like a rental car, they’re more like a taxi
that you drive yourself, except way cheaper.
For example, a few months ago, I took a one-way trip with my kids
within the city and the bill came out to €2.10.
Yeah, I had to drive myself, but I’ve never paid that little
for a taxi in a developed nation.
Now of course, not all trips are necessarily that
short and cheap. But from our carshare experience,
we’ve found it best not to think too much about
the individual cost of a trip. Rather, just think about the monthly cost,
compared to owning your own car. Sure, it might have cost us, say,
$15 to go to the big grocery store in the suburbs,
which is a lot for a single trip. But when we’d get the bill
at the end of the month we’d usually find that
all of our trips combined added up to less than
a hundred bucks. And that includes everything:
the car, the fuel, the insurance, the cleaning, the maintenance …
even the windshield wiper fluid.
So we had access to a car whenever we needed it,
but it cost us less than just the insurance did
when we used to have our own vehicle.
And yeah, owning your car can be a great convenience,
but it can also be a massive hassle, too.
When I’ve owned cars there were several times
when I’ve had problems with them, and it was my job to get them fixed.
For example the time my car’s computer malfunctioned
and all my plans were ruined while I spent the day waiting
for a tow truck, and for the mechanic to fix it.
And I was out about 600 bucks by the end of the day as well.
Carshare cars are reliable, and they’re well-maintained,
because it’s in the company’s best interest to keep them in service.
In 18 years and hundreds of carshare rides, I've only had a problem once,
and when that happened, I called their hotline,
they booked me another car nearby, and I just left the broken car
at the side of the road for them to deal with.
They even gave me a discount on my rental for the trouble.
That’s great.
It's also nice not to have to worry about my car getting damaged.
Or having to deal with insurance. Or having my car broken into,
which has happened to me. Carsharing gives you access to a car,
but it removes all of the stress, hassle, and expense
of owning your own vehicle.
Every carshare system we’ve used has per-minute rates, but they
sometimes have discounts for longer trips, weekends,
and multi-day trips as well. For example, it's common
to have a maximum rate of, say, 5 to 8 hours per day,
and after that, you pay the 24 hour rate.
So if we were planning a roadtrip, we’d usually pick up the car
the night before and park it right in front of our house,
so it was ready to go the next morning, at no extra cost.
For example, one of the times we lived in Toronto,
our family used to drive to go skiing every Sunday in the winter.
The daily rate at the time was $85, so our car cost for those winter months
was $340 for four days of skiing. But of course other months of the year
we might not use it at all, so then we’d pay nothing.
The average car spends 96% of its time parked.
But you’re still paying for it to sit there. I like the idea that
when I’m not using the car, I’m not paying for it,
and I’m not worrying about it. That’s a level of freedom
you just don’t get with car ownership.
You really have to be using a car more than every single weekend,
every week of the year, before carshare comes anywhere close
to the cost of owning your own vehicle. Which is why we had our policy:
if we didn’t need to drive to work, we didn’t need to own a car.
Even when we had two kids. And we saved a hell of a lot of money
doing so.
Here in Amsterdam, we have a lot of different
carshare services available to us.
All of this choice has given us the luxury
of being able to only use carshare programs that have
electric vehicles, because I generally think it’s impolite
to give little kids asthma when I’m going somewhere.
The way these systems work is pretty similar,
and they’re generally the same in other cities as well.
So here’s what a typical trip looks like
on a modern free-floating carshare service.
First, you open the app, and you’re presented with
a map of cars nearby. There are usually several cars
within a short walk, but there have been a few busy times
that I had to take a quick bike ride out to pick up my preferred car.
Some services use only one or two models of car,
especially those that are owned by a specific car company.
Other services have several different makes and models,
and I’ve enjoyed trying out every type of car available.
I can confidently say that the Nissan Leaf
is my favourite electric car.
You select the car you want in the app, and it’s reserved for fifteen minutes,
giving you enough time to get to the car.
When you get to your car, you take a quick look around
and check for any damage. New damage can be reported in the app.
You can also use the app to let them know if the car is dirty.
In my experience, carshare cars are almost always clean,
because people don't want to get charged for leaving it dirty, and the carshare company
professionally cleans their cars on a regular basis.
You unlock the doors from the app. Depending on the model of the car
you may need to get the keys out of the glove box,
but for most electric cars you never need the keys
because the app has already unlocked it, and you just need to press the start button.
Then you adjust the seat and mirrors, turn off whatever terrible radio station
the person before you was listening to, and that’s it.
The whole process takes no more than a minute or two,
and you’re ready to drive.
You can take the car for as long as you want,
and you can park it as necessary. The carshare company will provide
a fuel card or fob to pay for any fuel or electricity
that you use.
Here in the Netherlands there are public car-charging stations
almost everywhere, and they work just by
tapping a fob to the charger. Driving an electric car
in the Netherlands is great, but I’ll talk about that in more detail,
in a future video.
We’ve often had car-chargers at our campgrounds or hotels,
and as long as we used the fob, the electricity is included
in the cost of the carshare, which is nice.
The carshare service gives you a credit if you return the car
with more fuel or battery than when you picked it up,
so I usually plug it in near my destination when I return it.
Having a free-floating carshare service available is really useful.
I can drive out to the pub and then take a taxi or public transport
home after drinking. I can walk or take public transport to a shop,
and then get a car to carry my heavy purchases home,
if I end up buying something.
As you can tell, I’m a really big fan of carshare services,
and they've only become better over the years. They allow us to live in a
walkable urban environment and save a lot of money on transportation,
while still having access to a car or cargo van when we need it.
I don’t ever plan on owning a car again, because I find them more trouble
than they’re worth, and here in Amsterdam, a properly designed city,
a car is rarely the best way to get around. Plus nearly the whole country
is accessible with a combination of bicycle + train.
But it’s nice to know that in those rare times that I do need one,
or want to drive one, I still have a car available.
In fact, I have a whole fleet of them.
I’d like to thank my supporters on Patreon, who pay me to drive through Amsterdam.
Get out of my way you bloody cyclists!
If you’d like to support the channel, and get access to bonus videos,
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