Good to Go

On a hot afternoon four months ago, Larry Shaeffer was driving east on Pine Street in rush-hour traffic when the cars in front of him started to swerve wildly in every direction. Larry hit the brakes till he was inching forward. He figured somebody had double-parked, blocking a lane. It happens a lot in Center City. But as Larry approached the disturbance, he could see that it wasn’t a car at all. It was a woman. She was trying to cross the street. Larry looked closer. Something was wrong. The woman was holding her ground. Instead of stepping away from the cars as they swerved to avoid her, she was lunging toward them. The cars were juking her, like running backs — faking one way, then the other, trying to get by. It looked like the woman was trying to kill herself by getting hit with a car.

Suicide by car.

Holy crap.

Larry pulled to the curb at 20th and Pine, got out, and grabbed the woman by the elbow. Larry is a tall man who does a lot of hiking — tanned arms, flat brown hair. He said, “Now, whatever you’re doing, getting hit by a car is not going to make it better.” His gaze fell on the woman. She looked to be in her late 30s, and was dressed in shorts and a tank top. Her eyes had a glazed-over quality, like a fogged windshield. She struggled against Larry’s grip, trying to jump back into traffic. Larry held on with his left hand and opened his cell phone with his right hand, ready to call 911.

Then Larry noticed that the woman was mumbling to herself in a low voice. She seemed to be telling a sad story about cars: “He has the keys, he keeps the keys, he goes away for a couple days, I don’t have any cars, I don’t have any cars.” She repeated that over and over: “He’s got the keys, I don’t have the keys.” After a minute or two, Larry gathered that she was talking about her boyfriend. The boyfriend wasn’t letting the woman drive his cars.

Larry said, “Have you ever heard of PhillyCarShare?”

The woman made eye contact for the first time. “Yeah, I’ve heard of PhillyCarShare,” she said. “They have red cars.”

“Yeah, some of them are red,” Larry said. It was true. PhillyCarShare had red cars — salsa-red Toyota Prius hybrids, especially — but also blue cars, gold cars, silver cars, happy-face-yellow cars. CarShare is essentially a car-rental company, only hipper and smoother. Larry co-founded CarShare as a nonprofit back in 2002, with the goal of making life easier for the carless — for people who don’t drive often enough to justify the expense of car ownership but who nonetheless need a car for the occasional trip or errand. CarShare leases more than 400 vehicles and parks them in “pods” all over the city. Some pods are in parking garages, some are on the street. CarShare’s 35,000-plus members can reserve any of those cars with a few quick keystrokes on a Web page, then zoom off in a car whose doors are most likely branded with the CarShare logo — two stick figures carrying a symbolic “key to the city” under their arms.