Car or No Car?

Car-sharing (car-pooling if you’re in the USA) is one thing, and car rental is another, but they come together in a weird way in the variety of schemes appearing in the UK that allow people to rent a car, cost-effectively, in Brighton, Cambridge, London, Maidstone (don’t worry if you’ve never heard of Maidstone, it’s a strange place), Oxford and Southampton.

It’s called car-sharing, not because you get in a car with somebody else, which can be problematic for all kinds of reasons, not least for solo-travelling women, but because, after you’ve paid your annual fee (around £50 or $100) you get to ‘borrow’ a car from the company for around £4 or $8 per hour. The UK’s leading car-sharing company is Streetcar, founded in 2004, and they have more than 1000 cars in a variety of locations, and sizes.

Why share a car?

Car-sharing has fantastic upsides: it’s flexible, you don’t have to pay additional costs for insurance or road or vehicle tax, you don’t have any maintenance costs and you don’t have to clean the damn car! The car is only used when needed, meaning a dozen or more people can share the vehicle over a week, reducing the number of cars on the road, and the planning ahead involved in managing your car hire means that public transport and car-pooling also become natural options for many travellers. There’s no need to pay for parking when you don’t need it, no risk of car theft or vandalism destroying your vehicle, and no worry about having to maintain an ageing and increasingly dangerous and polluting vehicle.

It sounds perfect, and – if you live in major city and need a car only intermittently – it can be the ideal solution. My friend Jenny, for example, travels to work three days a week on the Underground, but the other two days: when she has to take in materials to teach an Adult Education Class in textiles, she ‘borrows’ a car from a car-sharing company. It works for her, and it works for the environment.

Who can car-share?

Of course there are some downsides:

1. If you live outside a major city in the south of England (ignoring Maidstone, which is a smallish town for which there is no logic to being a car-share centre) then you’re stuffed.

2. You have to be over 21 and under 75 and not have had more than a single accident for which an insurance claim has been made in the previous three years. That rules out a lot of young drivers who can’t afford cars and/or are environmentally conscientious, and a lot of older drivers who’d like to be occasional car users but no longer have a lifestyle that requires car ownership.

3. If you return your car early, you don’t get a refund

4. You have to have a credit or debit card – you can’t use cash.

But even with those somewhat bureaucratic restrictions, this kind of system might be the answer to a lot of people’s problems: I’d certainly give it a shot … except that my lifestyle requires a small van rather than a car because of the food growing that I do and the materials I have to transport and – so far at least – no car-share company has deigned to add vans to its rental list.
Car-share vehicle courtesy of Streetcar

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