Good to Go

And at every early pitch, at every early community meeting, there were these passionate CarShare people — sometimes it was Larry, energetic and grassroots and crunchy as hell, but it was also Clayton and Tanya, who didn’t seem like hippies, who were the kind of people who drank soda at the Christmas party, who had spent their working lives at computers, in conference rooms, wearing sensible clothes, talking about maps. Tanya, red-haired, bespectacled, was from San Francisco, the daughter of a research physicist and a legal mediator; Clayton was from Miami, the son of a Brooklyn jewelry salesman and a Las Vegas blackjack dealer. They loved cities in general and this city specifically. Neither owned a car. (Tanya tools around town on a little folding bike.) Crucially, they knew how to talk to stakeholders, especially Clayton — how to, in the words of Clayton’s old boss at Parsons Brinckerhoff, “boil it down into a sound bite.” And Tanya and Clayton were canny, because they needed everybody on board if CarShare was going to work. They needed the Parking Authority. They needed SEPTA.

By the end of 2002, CarShare had 134 members. By the end of the next year, it was 721. Then 1,730. Then 3,045, the year that Clayton and Tanya started dating, became a couple. Then 10,172. Now it’s over 35,000. When I asked Clayton how big he thought CarShare could get, he said, “Somewhere between here and a million,” which is the number of people in the Philly metro area who don’t use a car to commute, minus the number of people who live in neighborhoods too sprawled-out to support CarShare, minus a few hundred thousand for humility’s sake. It’s possible that the for-profit national company Flexcar could cut into CarShare’s market share — Flexcar now has about 100 cars in the city — but Clayton says he’s not worried: “It’s business as usual for us.”

BUSINESS AS USUAL is rapid expansion. Now that CarShare’s yearly budget is up to $10 million, the board wants to put cars in every neighborhood in the city. Even in the poor parts. The black parts. CarShare users have always been overwhelmingly white and hyper-educated — “It was almost like you had to be a Ph.D. to join,” Clayton jokes — and now the focus is on what Clayton calls, in a sort-of inapt term, “middle Philadelphia. More of your average Joe.” Which explains the break-dancers that CarShare hired to bust moves in Rittenhouse Square earlier this year, in an attempt to “introduce green into the urban culture a lot more.” This is not the smoothest pitch, nor the least condescending — to tell poor black people to consume less (Clayton: “So right now, lower-middle-income culture is to get more, to move up in society, to consume more”) requires a lot more subtlety than even the canniest transportation planner can muster. But if CarShare is still working on the language of expansion, it’s got the car part of it nailed.