We know, of course, that if we want to be good citizens, we ought to drive less. Change our behavior. Hard to do, easier to talk about. Here is the key number, then — the number that brings the accomplishment of CarShare into stark relief. Ten thousand. Of its 35,000 members, CarShare has convinced more than 10,000 to get rid of their cars. In five short years, starting from nothing — from an idea and a few thousand bucks in spare change — CarShare has taken a meat cleaver to that quintessential emotional bond, the car/America bond, 10,000 times. And it’s still hacking away. There are now car-sharing services in at least 21 U.S. cities, but CarShare’s leaders say they’re expanding faster than any of them, adding more than 4,000 members in October alone — their best month ever.
In a great American city, CarShare has redefined an American birthright as an American burden. And the real question — the question with relevance for any corporate marketer, any idealistic Green, basically anyone trying to convince us consumers to change our behavior for the Good — has got to be the simplest one …
How?
How the hell did they do it?
LARRY KNEW THERE WERE BOG TURTLES BY THE river. He’d seen them with his own eyes. Bog turtles are an endangered species in Pennsylvania, and he worried that the new highway the state was planning to build through Doylestown — this was back in 1996 — would disrupt their habitat. Larry led a successful community protest against the highway, plastering the town with fliers: WE DON'T NEED MORE ROADS, WE NEED LESS CARS.
The less-cars mantra got Larry curious about car sharing, a concept invented by Europeans in the ’40s, revived in Europe in the ’80s, and picked up by progressives in West Coast cities like Portland and San Francisco. In 2002, Larry — who restores furniture for a living and runs a tree-planting nonprofit called Philly Tree — attended a meeting of the Washington Square West Civic Association. He told the board, much of it lawyers, about the virtues of car sharing. The lawyers weren’t into it. But a lanky guy in the back of the room felt something click.
Clayton Lane was a transportation planner with the Philly office of the national firm Parsons Brinckerhoff. He worked on huge municipal projects all over the country. A lot of the time it was his job to tell cities that their ideas were dumb. “The Simpsons monorail exists in every major city,” he says. Other times he worked frantic 60-hour weeks only to see the project vanish, like the $3 billion extension of the Broad Street Line here in Philly. “I spent seven years there, enjoyed it a lot, and never saw a single thing I worked on get built.” But with car sharing, “We could actually do this,” he thought.
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