{"id":11705,"date":"2010-06-14T13:08:42","date_gmt":"2010-06-14T17:08:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacingtoronto.ca\/?p=11705"},"modified":"2013-01-21T13:12:47","modified_gmt":"2013-01-21T18:12:47","slug":"lorinc-wheres-the-car-sharing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2010\/06\/14\/lorinc-wheres-the-car-sharing\/","title":{"rendered":"LORINC: Where’s the (car) sharing?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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While ad creep has yet to make an appearance in the 2010 election, Joe Pantalone\u2019s pastel hued Smart car (Daimler AG) gets the nod as the most visible example to date of politically conscious corporate branding (product placement?).<\/p>\n

The spiffy little vehicle is presumably meant to signal Pantalone\u2019s environmental bona fides<\/em>, and mesh with what his organizers promise will be a strategically upbeat, forward-looking campaign.<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s with the grim, backward-looking rhetoric in his stump speeches, such as the one he delivered to a sparse Board of Trade crowd on Friday morning?<\/p>\n

Citing the decades of decline in three other Great Lakes cities \u2014 Cleveland, Detroit and Buffalo \u2014 Pantalone implied that a vote for his opponents could imperil our future. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing written in the Bible, the Torah, the Koran or whatever else that Toronto will be a great city forever.\u201d<\/p>\n

Apr\u00e8s Miller, le d\u00e9luge? Oh, please.<\/p>\n

Toronto \u2014 socially, economically, and culturally \u2014 has precious little in common with U.S. rust belt cities. Virtually all of our challenges involve growth, not exodus. Toronto doesn\u2019t have the donut disease, and Pantalone, who\u2019s been involved in downtown redevelopment decisions for three decades, should surely know that.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Anway, back to that conspicuous Smart car. My question for Pantalone is this: Why isn\u2019t he tooling around town in a car-share vehicle? After all, if he wants to align himself with a dense, green urban future, that\u2019s a really good way to get there.<\/p>\n

Autoshare president Kevin McLaughlin says the number of car-share members in Toronto jumped to 20,000 from 2,000 since 2006 — a stunning growth rate linked directly to the increasing density in the core. With Zipcar hungry for market share, those numbers show no sign of slowing any time soon.<\/p>\n

Industry studies, McLaughlin says, indicate that a single car-share vehicle [PDF]<\/a> removes three to six privately-owned vehicles from the road, reduces cost of living and prevents the emission of 1.2 tonnes of carbon per member per year. About 15% of Autoshare members get rid of one car and 25% opt not to purchase a second.<\/p>\n

Yet despite these layered benefits, none of the mayoral candidates, including a self-styled environmentalist like Pantalone, has said boo about a rapidly emerging low-carbon transportation alternative\u2026and this in a race dominated by intense debate over congestion, bike lanes and transit expansion. Weird.<\/p>\n

The city in recent years has taken baby steps to promote car-sharing. Condo developers now have an option to cut back on parking spots on the condition that they permit car share firms to locate vehicles in their garages. And a few municipal departments have started using car-share services instead of standard city-owned fleet vehicles.<\/p>\n

But McLaughlin says the city\u2019s purchasing and expensing procedures have prevented the municipality from making more use of car sharing. And the city has yet to follow Montreal and Vancouver\u2019s lead in requiring high-rise developers to include parking spaces for car-share vehicles.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, antiquated rental rules prevent firms like Autoshare and Zipcar from making more in-roads in high rises. McLaughlin says Craig\u2019s List Toronto is filled with ads for parking spaces in the Concord Adex highrises, but car-share firms aren\u2019t allowed to rent them because they\u2019re not tenants.<\/p>\n

Three major car-share issues await the next council.<\/p>\n

One involves the use of street-parking spaces for car-share vehicles. Toronto officials are plodding away with a pilot, even though cities like Vancouver, Montreal, Portland and San Francisco all allow dedicated on-street car-share spaces.<\/p>\n

The second has to do with creating incentives for developers to outfit car-share spaces with electric vehicle infrastructure, so the car-share firms can go out and purchase EVs as part of their green marketing strategies.<\/p>\n

The third focuses on the potential for developing transit smart cards that also allow users to access car share vehicles as well as the new bike sharing service to be launched shortly. Bundling will invariably help reduce private car useage. \u201cIt\u2019s important for us to get in a room together and look to the future,\u201d says McLaughlin.<\/p>\n

Unless, of course, if you\u2019re a candidate for mayor. Even the most broad-ranging transportation plan unveiled to date \u2013 George Smitherman\u2019s \u2013 makes no mention of car-sharing, despite his oft-stated goal of creating integrated solutions.<\/p>\n

As it happens, two car share networks in Ottawa and Quebec \u2014 Vrtucar and Communauto \u2014 this week announced a major initiative<\/a> to knit together their services across the border, creating a 1,200 location car-sharing network extending from suburban Ottawa to Quebec City, Montreal and Sherbrooke. (Communauto this month also launched a joint marketing\/discount program with Via Rail.)<\/p>\n

The mayors of Ottawa and Gatineau both turned up at the official launch to laud the effort \u2013 a gesture, McLaughlin observes, that further validates the importance of car-sharing as an ultra-cheap means of fighting urban congestion.<\/p>\n

Now that\u2019s Smart.<\/p>\n

photo by Gabi<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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