Good to Go

A few hundred people, mostly young, racially diverse, swarmed around and between and even inside the parked cars against a sparkling skyline, listening to a mixed-race rock band that was not very good, waiting for the movie to start. (Cars, of course.) Two men in green bodysuits and green face paint, the CarShare mascots, walked around holding a giant key and making mime faces at little kids. Clayton and Tanya beamed. Like everybody else, I walked around, pawing at the cars. When I got to the red Miata, I stopped.

There was a woman inside, sitting in the passenger seat. She was reading a book. It said Mrs. Big. She looked totally comfortable — nothing weird here, just sitting in a parked car on a rooftop, reading a book. She was Tayetta Jones, 44. I asked if she owned a car. “No. No. Car insurance.” She shook her head. “And gas. It’s just too much.” She lives near Einstein Hospital in North Philly, and parking is a nightmare: “If you don’t get there early, you will not get a spot in front of your own door.”

I asked what she thought of the Miata. “It’s really really roomy. I was surprised. I can stretch out in it.”

I asked if she considered herself an environmentally minded person. She thought for a second, cocked her head, and said, “Yeeeeaahhhh,” with less than total conviction, adding that when she goes to the grocery store, she usually reuses her shopping bags.

I’M SURE TAYETTA is a good person — about as good as I am, or Clayton is. Which is to say, intermittently good. “I still use plastic bags, right?” says Clayton. “I’ve been using them for years. And I recently discovered they’re a bad thing. And I’m still using them.” It’s likely that Tayetta answered the way she did because it felt like the “right” answer. I would have done the same. We Americans — hell, humans — over-report our virtue and under-report our vice. We lie to researchers about how much we eat, how much we drink and have casual sex and all the rest. Fortunately, CarShare is the rare environmental nonprofit whose success, utility and influence don’t depend on its members being good. It works fine if its members are selfish. In fact, it depends on self-seeking behavior for its continued growth and effectiveness — just like consumer capitalism, at its best, and like the American Constitution … methods of manipulating human nature to achieve a common good.