Ottawa-Vanier Greens

In this article, green party member and past candidate Chris Bradshaw explores the possibilities of a “Carsharing / Ridesharing” hybrid.

The automobile industry doesn’t have a monopoly on the word “hybrid.” It actually comes from plant genetics, to refer to merging two different strains of the same plant species into a new one, hopefully with the strengths rather than the weaknesses of both. What the car companies do monopolize is transportation in the suburbs.

Will that be reversed by spending over a billion dollars on building light rail to link our urban communities? In my opinion, the answer is NO. I am proposing a solution that better fits the realities, one that will cost taxpayers almost nothing, while reducing by more than half individuals’ personal transportation budgets. I am working on developing “hybrids” combining different travel modes. This article deals with the one that can be implemented most easily and focuses on the suburbs.

Most readers will recognize that carsharing - provided in Ottawa by Vrtucar, and around the world by over 300 other CSOs (carsharing organizations) - is itself a hybrid. It combines car rental with informal sharing of cars, such as, “Can I borrow your car for a few hours?” Sharing is really mankind’s oldest technology. Carsharing adds more modern technologies: on-line bookings, GPS, and handheld communication devices like the Blackberry.

The campaigns to fight auto-dependency depend on people treating the “alternatives” walking, cycling, transit, car-rental, carsharing, ridesharing, taxi, and delivery services as an integrated “suite.” The problem is that they are poorly linked. It is no wonder that most people who try mixing-and-matching give up pretty quickly, especially in winter, when children have to be transported, or when arrival times are mandatory. So they break down and get a car, which they then use for just about all their trips, not for just the ones they originally “needed” a car for.

I suggest combining carsharing with ridesharing as a way to
overcome shortcomings of both:

* Vrtucar’s carsharing in Ottawa has attracted about 700 members, mostly living in older neighbourhoods, who take turns using 35 cars for trips that average four hours. It is rarely used for commuting; and it is not available to those who live and/or work in the suburbs, where residential and business uses are separated, making it impossible to find good single carsharing
locations.

Ridesharing, according to the Ottawa planning people, currently serves about 1400 participants, and it is used mainly for peak- hour commuting. It is more common in the U.S., which has used air-quality legislation to create carrots and sticks to induce employers and employees to accept a seat in a car driven by a co- worker when seats in transit are either non-existent for their commute, or too awkward.

Ridesharing appeals to transportation planners more than carsharing does, since it focuses on long rush-hour trips. But it isn’t catching on. Besides the problems of finding enough people with the same regular hours and matching residential and work locations, there is the fact that, along with all the “alternative” modes, participants have no access to a car during the 9-10 hours they are away from home each workday, as they would have if the brought their own car. Also, there are issues about how to share costs, insurance, and schedule disruptions (holidays, sick leave).

Carsharing could overcome all of these problems since the cars after all, are shared. All that would be required is for the provider to assign two station locations for each car, one in a residential area and one in a business park. This would provide shared cars during the workday to all employees at the business park, and provide shared cars evenings and weekend in various residential neighbourhoods. The rideshare component would provide the regular shifting of the cars each workday between the two stations. That’s right any person with a membership could access the cars for personal (or business) trips, not just the persons participating in the ridesharing.

This hybrid system would reduce the automobile needs of suburban dwellers enough that the shared car would replace the need for a second car, in contrast to the older neighbourhoods, where shared cars replace most members’ only car. And it reflects the only sane, practical way to use cars on a limited road system: simultaneous sharing at peak-hour trips; consecutive sharing off- peak. Widespread sharing of vehicles would reduce parking spaces by over 75 percent and eliminate road congestion.

To avoid peak-hour pressure on the road system, city transportation engineers like their ilk all over the world push transit as the solution, since it is cheaper than widening the roads where buildings are tightly packed. So far so good. But a bus used only at peak hour is used only 20 hours a week; but the buses are designed and priced to be driven 110 hours a week. That means writing off a lot of public money.

I challenge OC Transpo to show taxpayers average revenues and costs per seat per week for their rush-hour routes vs. what it is for the regular routes. The average ride is longer than regular service, and costs include “incentivizing” split-shift drivers and the fact that rush-hour buses are driven more kilometres out- of-service than in-service.

In the suburbs, the reality is that roads are all built wider from the get-go, but they still are not wide enough at intersections, where there are at least four signal phases and arriving traffic is spread out over as many as 20 lanes. The turning radii and many lanes make crossing distances long for pedestrians. Suburb commuting distances are far longer than distances for shopping, appointments, and events. OC Transpo provides only a system for the former, leaving people to use a car for what are now the more frequent trips, those within a five-km radius of town centres and regional shopping centres.

And since both the residential and workplace densities are so low, there is no way to serve the suburbanites’ commuting trips unless parking is expensive (and that is rare). This leaves it uneconomical, even with subsidies, when the smalled buses have 48 seats. Since jobs downtown and at the few public campuses represent only about 20% of total jobs (which have both high densities and expensive parking), 80% of commuting is left to the car companies to salivate over.

Here’s how the hybrid of carsharing and ridesharing would work. I am working on a proposal for the city’s official plan reviewers, at my own initiative, for a demonstration project. I will identify five nodes to link several work-live pairs, say Kanata North Business Park & Old Kanata, Kanata South Business Park & Bridlewood, Nepean South Business Park & Longfields, Hunt Club Park & Ottawa South Business Park, and Chapel Hill & Sheffield Business Park. Allowing for all combinations and permutations, it would require 20 cars (five locations, each linked to the other four).

That would mean that each business park would have four cars arrive each morning at their designated workday stations, and therefore be available to any of the several thousand employees during the day for personal and business trips (think of how that will appeal to those using “alternative” modes!) At the end of the day, each car would go into rideshare mode again and, after all passengers have been dropped off and the car returned to its other station, neighbourhood residents would have four shared cars available evenings and weekends for personal trips: errands, events, and outings. That would give each of the five business parks and five residential area a sufficient number of vehicles to allow redundancy of choice.

I am proposing seven-passenger minivans be used. My reason is two-fold: a) it will provide extra seats to accommodate more riders, and b) vans are large and ultra-versatile, making them appealing for users who, in most cases will have their own small first car, but who would need access some of the time to a vehicle for large loads: people and/or “stuff,” e.g., birthday parties, transporting lumber, bringing home some antique furniture. Too often such large vehicles are chosen as a person’s first car, making it oversized for 95% of the trips it is used for, burning gas unnecessarily.

Would this compete with OC Transpo? Not really; it would actually help them. Transit doesn’t really serve suburb-to- suburb commutes in first place. And it also doesn’t work very hard at reducing its biggest competitor: car ownership. Any hybrid involving carsharing does, since it provides occasional access to a car for driving. We share the roads; why not the cars, too?

With such a program, it would be easy to accommodate those who live downtown and “reverse” commute: get to jobs in the suburbs going the opposite direction to rush-hour routes. Those living downtown can use the shared cars now located near them to overcome the poor bus service in that opposite-to-peak-hour direction. And these cars would add to the others located at the business parks from the suburban rideshares.

Such a hybrid would require some initial assistance from government, to get it off the ground, probably in the form of revenue guarantees for the first six months, and support at getting access to workplaces to sign people up. The cost to someone participating only in the ridesharing would probably be slightly less than a monthly OC Transpo passes (which, I point out are subsidized), or $70/month, assuming that four of the seven seats are filled each day. To use the minivan individually at other times would cost about $3 an hour ($3.60 Friday through weekend) plus 36>/km and cover the gasoline and all insurance. The neighbourhood location at the beginning would probably be in a rented space on a main street, near to both some local shopping and the person doing the driving.

Cf: www.vrtucar.com; www.ottawarideshare.com

Chris Bradshaw was a member of the Regional government planning department for 22 years, and started Vrtucar in 2000, selling his interests to his partner in October 2006. He was also founder and former president of Ottawalk (1988-2000). He lives “car- lite” with his wife in Sandy Hill. He can be reached at hearth@ties.ottawa.on.ca