That “Shared” Parking Space is All Mine! Setting the Right Policy for On-Street Car-Sharin

Panelists at the meeting will include Elliot Martin, a research engineer with UC Berkeley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center, Andy Thornley, the project analyst in charge of on-street car-sharing in San Francisco, and a representative from City CarShare.

The notion of the “public commons” probably doesn’t bring to mind the curb outside your home or the parking spaces along the local shopping street. But who gets to use our city streets has often been at issue throughout decades of conflict between the public interest in providing shared resources and the thoroughly rational desire of people and their startups to fence off those resources for their own benefit. In reality, there are all sorts of ways we already allow limited private use of public space. The trick is to find an approach that strikes the right balance among various benefits and costs to the public.

Nevertheless, charging individuals and companies to park on public streets is unexceptional and almost universal. And there’s a strong argument that we have long set aside too much public land to provide free parking. The novelty with on-street car-sharing is that spots are reserved exclusively for one company’s vehicles. This is a requirement of the round-trip car-share model, because members need to locate cars reliably and know they can return them to a guaranteed space at the end of the rental.

Under San Francisco’s On-Street Car Share Pilot Program, approved car share organizations (CSOs) are allowed exclusive access to specific parking places on city streets. Some places might previously have been metered spots; others maybe were just a curbside space at the corner of two residential streets. CSOs request what spots they want and these requests are approved by the SFMTA board. For each space, the CSO pays a one-time set-up and installation fee of $400 and an annual permit fee ranging from $600 in the far south and east of the city, through $1,800 in our neighborhood, to $2,700 downtown. The city then paints the curb red, posts a “No Stopping Except Car Share” sign, and hands it over to the CSO.

Three CSOs have been approved by San Francisco for the pilot. City CarShare is a Bay Area non-profit founded in 2001. ZipCar is an international company founded in 2000 and now owned by Avis-Budget Group. GetAround is a venture capital-funded startup that allows private individuals to rent their cars to other members. It was founded in 2009 and is based in San Francisco. The city requires vehicles to be available for rent 75% of the time, so GetAround’s car owners can still use their vehicles up to 42 hours a week.

While many drivers would bristle at any plan that removes parking spaces, many of us also recognize that the liberal provision of free parking has sustained a car culture in the United States that has been a major contributor to all sorts of problems, from congestion and urban sprawl to climate change. The city’s pilot program raises many questions, including:
How strong is the evidence for the environmental benefits of car sharing?
How much difference does car-sharing really make when many people own cars to commute to jobs outside the city?
What should be our guiding principles in balancing car-share spaces with other uses of our streets?
Should we move from a pilot to a permanent scheme and if so under what terms?

To hear some answers or suggest your own come to the HANC general membership meeting, 7 pm Thursday, July 9 at 1833 Page Street near Cole.