Merging into the mainstream

AMSTERDAM When Mariane Polfliet discovered that she had an emergency meeting in a hard-to-reach suburb of Amsterdam last week, there was no need to panic: Within minutes, she used a computer-coded electronic car key to drive away in one of the hundreds of shared cars that are now scattered around the canals of the city center. There was something incongruous about the package: Polfliet - dressed for a Mercedes in an elegant tan suit with a lawyerly leather briefcase - driving the small, bright red Peugeot 206 with the neon-green wheels and tornado screaming "Greenwheels" stenciled on the door. But for thousands of people in the Netherlands - and hundreds of thousands worldwide - car-sharing groups like Greenwheels have filled the gap between private car ownership and public transportation. For cities where it has taken hold, the concept is helping to ease traffic congestion and reduce pollution, studies have found. "Some lawyers don't want to visit clients in a car like this, but I don't care, because this idea has changed my life," said Polfliet, who uses Greenwheels instead of owning a private car. Although car-sharing has been a mythic "green" concept for decades, it has become a larger-scale reality only in the past few years - and then only in a handful of places, like Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands, where it has been successfully reinvented and commercialized by a small number of companies relying heavily on computer technology. Overall, far more car-sharing projects have failed than succeeded in the past 15 years, and most are still too small to have a civic impact. Still, as urban centers face ever more serious traffic snarls and new technology makes car-sharing simpler, dozens of cities in Europe, North America and Asia - from Singapore to Turin to Minneapolis - are re-exploring and investing in the idea. In January, representatives from a number of cities met in Brussels at a conference organized by a European Union initiative to promote car-sharing. "We see a big potential for European cities," the report concluded, estimating that at least half a million private vehicles could be replaced by car-sharing. But the debate continues about whether car-sharing is a boutique industry that works well in certain slightly offbeat places, like Amsterdam, or whether it can become an essential part of urban transportation strategy, like buses and taxis. "I think it's going to be another 10 years before it's going to have a really big impact generally," said Dave Brook, an independent car consultant in the United States. "But we can say now that it's definitely a viable niche, and its going to be a damn big niche as well." Private companies, including some of the giants of the rental car industry, like Hertz and Shell, are dabbling in commercial car-sharing. There are about 300,000 people involved in car-sharing worldwide, with the majority in Europe, according to Susan Shaheen, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley. Mobility, the largest single company, with locations all over Switzerland, has 60,000 members and 2,400 cars. In the United States, in total, there are just over 1,000 shared cars. The logic is simple: Owning a car is both expensive and impractical in many cities, and parking is highly limited. In Amsterdam, city center parking permits take six years to obtain. But what happens when a child misses a school bus? Or you need to transport bulky purchases? Or you want to drive a guest to the airport? Greenwheels provides an alternative. For members, who pay as little as €5, or $6, a month in base fees, driving away in a shared car is almost as quick as getting in to your own private vehicle. After massive expansion in the last two years, Greenwheels cars are parked all over central Amsterdam, often only a few hundred meters apart. Members locate the nearest available car on the Internet and reserve it, automatically sending a wireless signal to the car's onboard computer to recognize the client's personalized key and pin code. They return the car to its specifically reserved parking place (leased by Greenwheels from the city), and are billed on a monthly basis, based on tallies of kilometers and hours driven by the on-board computer. "We were haunted by the idea that you could use technology to make this idea into a large scale, professional operation that would be very convenient for customers - and we know it would have a good effect on the environment," said Jan Borghuis, co-founder of 10-year-old Greenwheels, dressed in the de-facto company uniform of shorts, sandals and a T-shirt, in the company's ramshackle Rotterdam office surrounded by bicycle tires rather than auto parts. Starting with three old leased cars and an automated telephone answering tree (all departments led to Borghuis), Greenwheels spent its first six years losing money, said his partner, Gijs van Lookeren Campagne, slowly accumulating a critical mass of members and cars, and evolving their recipe for car-sharing. For "competitive reasons," the two will not say how many members or cars are now in the network (the key to the recipe), although there are more than 300 pick-up locations in Amsterdam and 80 in Rotterdam - numbers that are increasing weekly. Within the last year, they have bought a competing company in Amsterdam as well as the largest German car-sharing plan, StattAuto, which was renamed Greenwheels as of this month. On a recent evening, Renée Lion, 31, and two colleagues were heading out of Rotterdam in a Greenwheels car that "lives" two blocks from his home, to a company outing in the countryside. "It's so simple, I don't think we could have gone without this," he said. The actual environmental impact is less straightforward, although researchers say car-sharing certainly relieves traffic congestion and pollution to some degree by reducing car ownership. Studies suggest that one shared car replaces between 4 and 10 private cars, Shaheen said. The result is a 30 percent to 45 percent reduction in vehicle miles traveled for each customer. "On the whole this is very good for the environment," said Rens Meijkamp, a Dutch researcher, who found that nearly 50 percent of Greenwheels clients used the service as a replacement for either a first or second private car. After joining, families reduced their effect on the environment by 40 percent, he said. But the industry is still trying to define itself - not yet mature in Europe and "still in its adolescence" in the United States, Brook said. In some places companies are developing partnerships with state railroads or supermarkets. In others, cities have given shared-cars the right to drive in bus lanes. "I don't know exactly what is the potential of car-sharing or if it can be defined, but I think the demand will develop as far as the supply will become more attractive, simple and closer to each inhabitant," said J.B. Schmider at the Brussels Conference, manager of the fledgling French AutoPartage Network, which to date has only 2,500 members nationwide. Making it work - and work financially - has required a new type of science, and Greenwheels guards its formula like the recipe for Coke. Car rental companies want all their cars rented all the time. But car-sharing companies in Europe tend to view themselves more like savings banks whose currency is mobility: By having a large number of members, and an excess capacity of cars in the right places, they can accommodate an unusual event - taking out a car. Greenwheels' goal is to provide customers with a nearby car within five minutes. Last month there was a rare public transportation strike in Holland. "It was our moment of truth," said Borghuis, since most Greenwheels customers take trains to work. "In most places there were cars available when people needed them. That made us happy. We passed the test."