Monday, June 21, 2010

Eco-Monday: Car Sharing

Monday: Costco run; take the pickup
Wednesday: Farmer's market run; take the Prius
Thursday: Client meeting at The Hub Chemical Heritage Foundation site; take the Audi.

No, no, it's not the schedule of our friendly local millionaire; the guy with the twenty-car garage. It's the way our partners at PhillyCarShare envision a potential work week.

Goodness! So many cars to choose from!

As much as we love the idea of changing cars as often as we change our shoes, we're truly enamored of car-sharing for its environmental benefits. How's that, you say? It's still a car on the road, isn't it?
Well--at face value, it is. But for those of us working and living in big cities like Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago, it makes complete and total environmental sense to just have a car when we need it. Experts at Carsharing.net, an industry resource, estimate that for every one car share, there are 15-20 fewer cars on the road.
How's it work? Well, take PhillyCarShare for example. When staff at The Hub have to go between sites, we make a reservation at PhillyCarShare.org. We go to pick up the car at one of PhillyCarShare's many convenient parking spaces, and drop it off later.


Philly Car Share locations are convenient and plentiful.

In the end, we're keeping cars off the road by borrowing from a pool of cars that already exist. We're living healthier lives, because we've gotten used to walking or bicycling places that we might have just previously driven to out of sheer laziness.

And although the environmental benefits of car-sharing might be long-term, the economical value of our arrangement with PhillyCarShare is really quite immediate: We don't have to buy a fleet of Hub vehicles. And that makes car sharing a smart business decision, at the very least.

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