You may have noticed that I haven’t been blogging very actively on this site for awhile. That’s because I’ve because been working hard at reinventing the future of carsharing. I’ve moved to San Francisco where I am developing a new carshare model to give recurrent but infrequent urban drivers more affordable, convenient access to cutting edge cars parked in their apartment and around the city.
So why carshare? What happened to bikes? The data for modal shift from cars to, well, all things non-car is just fantastic- arguably better than for bikes. 9-13 cars are taken off the road for every carshare vehicle placed on the road. 47% less driving from members in a carshare service.
Getting people on bikes (and transit) by giving them a car seems counter intuitive, but unless you get people to let go of the steering wheel, it’s very difficult to convince them to do anything else. It’s too cheap and easy to just keep driving for most people. Once they do let go, they are much more open to investigating alternatives like a bicycle.
Carshare needs a new model to help it scale out of its current niche market and throw a huge monkey wrench in the car culture machine. That’s what we are working on reinventing at Upshift. Signup on our landing page at www.upshiftcars.com to stay abreast of our developments. You can also ping me at ezra [at] upshiftcars [dot] com to learn more.
