Good to Go

“We” was Clayton and Larry and three other like-minded souls they crossed paths with over the next few months, including a woman named Tanya Seaman, a planner with the Center City District. The five co-founders emptied their pockets and came up with $25,000 in start-up funds. They launched in November 2002 with two cars, a silver Prius and a blue Matrix, parked for free at the Whole Foods on South Street. For that first year, the board members did everything themselves — branding, accounting, answering phone calls, even car-washing. Larry had a system for washing cars modeled after the Viet Cong, who used to deliver supplies (and bombs) to villages on the backs of bikes. He loaded soaps and a portable vacuum cleaner onto his bike’s rack, pedaling from car to car, meeting Clayton on the weekends to do outreach, especially at farmers’ markets. The markets were ripe with “low-hanging fruit,” in Larry’s words: “Tree-huggers.” CarShare’s early-adopter demographic. Nowadays it’s free to sign up with CarShare, but back then, it cost $25 plus a $350 deposit. “The farmers were, like, amazed. They’d just observe me. People giving me their credit cards, their cash. What is this guy selling?”

That was the funny thing. In the beginning, the pitch was heavy on the environmental and civic benefits — CarShare members walk more, use trains more, keep money local, save the Earth, etc., etc. But the pitch shifted almost immediately to wallet concerns, to the bottom line. Even with the city agencies, the ones not known for being easy to work with or progressive, CarShare caught on — not because it was Good, but because it helped people Make Problems Go Away. The Parking Authority got involved early on, after Tanya made a pitch to the Authority’s Linda Miller, who’s now on the CarShare board; the Parking Authority thought CarShare could help relieve the parking crunch by taking cars off the road, freeing up spaces. The Parking Authority leased CarShare a few spots in its neighborhood lots (for free) and eventually created 40 new on-street spaces for pods. (CarShare pays a yearly fee for each spot.) For city government, which signed on to use CarShare, the benefits were even clearer. CarShare let the city get rid of as many as 330 fleet cars and save $7 million over five years — eliminating, in one fell swoop, the practice of cars “being handed down like Eagles tickets,” says Bob Fox, of the city’s Office of Fleet Management. Even in South Philly, where “the car is this sacred object,” says Councilman Frank DiCicco, CarShare caught on. DiCicco pitched it to his increasingly young, creative-class constituents, and even to the elderly Italians.