Come Help Flexcar Understand Downtown

By Eric Richardson
Published: Thursday, June 01, 2006, at 02:50PM

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — A representative from Flexcar is going to be presenting Monday at DLANC's Transportation & Public Works committee. If you're not familiar, Flexcar is a car-sharing service: you pay a yearly fee and then by the hour for time that you have one of the cars. Currently the company has cars Downtown at Union Station, the Bonaventure, Pershing Square, 7th/Flower and 11th/Grand.

I've been a member since last January when I went carless. It's a great concept, and I've actually used the car at 7th/Flower twice this week. Last year I even wrote a research paper on using car-sharing for City fleet vehicles to jump-start community uptake (17-pg PDF).

That said, it's nice to get the chance once again to tell someone from Flexcar how they're missing the boat on Downtown. This should be their perfect market. Adaptive reuse laws made it where parking is hard to come by and expensive. I really feel people would like to give up their cars.

But where is Flexcar in the Historic Core? Why are there not a couple cars at 6th/Main for the PE Building and the Santa Fe? Why are there not a couple cars at 4th/Main for the Old Bank Buildings? These are the perfect clusters for Flexcar, and they haven't made a move on them.

So if you're interested in the car-sharing concept come out Monday evening (6:30pm, Promenade West community room @ 880 W. First St) and help show that the market's there if the company would just reach out to it.

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Comments

1
jim winstead writes:

i cancelled my flexcar membership a couple of months ago. i wasn't using it often enough to justify the $40/year membership, and the $10/hour price was enough to make me reluctant to use it. (and celia has a car, so i have even less of a need for it.)

# on Jun.01.2006 AT 03:34 PM
2
Eric Richardson writes:

How much of that was cost, and how much was convenience? Would you have used it more were there a car closer to where you live?

# on Jun.01.2006 AT 04:40 PM
3
jim winstead writes:

i doubt i would have used it much more if there were a car closer to me. i had been without a car long enough that using a car to get somewhere wasn't part of my mindset.

# on Jun.03.2006 AT 03:46 PM
4
ken writes:

I can't be there tonight but they ought to put one at grand central market. Then you couldjust pay for one hour while you used the car to drive your groceries home. Plus, there are 150+ apartment units right there at the market, and lofts coming in across the street.

# on Jun.05.2006 AT 08:20 AM
5
David Kennedy writes:

My wife and I wanted to go carless about 18 months ago. I was using Metrolink and she doesn't have a driver's license. We didn't get the chance because of some bureaucratic snafu on the part of Flexcar. I can't even remember the details. I just remember saying "Hunh?" when they told me I couldn't sign up.

That said, despite giving it a go for a few months (we simply stopped using our car), it proved a challenge. Running errands, getting groceries, last minute runs to grandma's house; eventually, it proved to be too much of an aggravation. I'm sure if the long-awaited grocery store was open, that might have helped. But, now with three kids, the inevitable trips to Target and Costco would be a major headache without a car. Believe me, we tried.

Things might have been different if we'd actually used the Flexcar service. But, certainly, the location of the vehicles is very important. If I were to use the service, I'd definitely want to have access to the vehicles within a block or two. No more. I'd like to think that Flexcar's locations are easy to set up. If not they should be. If a building generates enough demand, they should be able to quickly meet that demand by setting up a pick-up location.

I actually think their pricing is a good deal. I think too many people don't see the big picture of the cost to own a car.

# on Jun.05.2006 AT 01:03 PM
6
David Kennedy writes:

How did the meeting go?

# on Jun.08.2006 AT 05:05 AM
7
Eric Richardson writes:

It went well. Flexcar's looking to add 20 cars to LA in the next year, and our job now is to convince them that these cars should go need the residents of Downtown. I'm hoping to get a discussion started with them on that.

# on Jun.08.2006 AT 08:55 AM

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