Zipcar co-founder Robin Chase has made renting wheels as easy as getting cash out of an ATM. More recently, she launched GoLoco, a national rideshare Web site with social networking elements. In advance of her talk at our Green Transportation salon next Monday, the forward-thinking Boston resident and mother of three spoke to Darrell Hartman about why our aversion to strangers and our dependence on cars might soon be things of the past.
How did Zipcar, which you founded in 1999, come about?
My cofounder Antje Danielson is German, and she was sitting in a café in Berlin when she looked across the street and saw a shared car—not uncommon in Europe. And she came back to the U.S. and said, ‘What a cool idea!’ And the light bulb went on over my head. I thought, ‘Wow, this is exactly what the internet was made for—sharing a scarce resource among a lot of people.’ And as a person living in a city, with three kids and one car that my husband would take and leave in a parking lot far away from me for eight hours a day, I really want this kind of service.
Would Zipcar have been possible without the Internet?
No! And I think that’s critical. It’s been done on a very small scale using paper and telephone calls, but the Internet makes the transaction effortless. There was no other way for it to scale and be worth everyone’s effort.
And now you have a ridesharing site, GoLoco, which is kind of like Zipcar meets social networking.
I would say it’s Facebook meets the ride board, with some Paypal thrown in. The idea was to use social networking, really nice mapping, email and alerts, and let people make the financial transaction quickly and easily.
I would think getting people to ride with strangers might be an obstacle.
Marketing is everything—how you spin it. All of us give rides to people all the time. If, for example, at this upcoming JANERA.com salon, I were sitting there at the end and said, ‘Hey, is anyone driving to Brooklyn? And if anyone in the room said, ‘Sure, I’ll drive you,’ we would go together in a car happily, because we had shared this one interaction. It’s similar with these social networks: if we went to the same university, or both liked hard rock—it’s just the very smallest of things that makes you feel fine about traveling with someone.
Have you ever hitchhiked before?
I did, once, with my dad when we had locked ourselves out of the car. And I know it was my presence—I was twelve at the time—that made people more willing to pick us up. I’ve got some interesting ideas that I’d like to try one day—a better cross between that hitchhiking phenomenon and ridesharing.
Do you mean something like those collectivo buses in Latin America?
Yes! These are just visions, and I have many visions. But you could imagine that on the top of your car—like the school bus sign on the top of the minivan, or the pizza delivery guy—you could type in, LEXINGTON $3 if you’re going to Lexington. And every single person on the side of the road would understand what that meant. So while you may or may not pick anyone up the first time, or the tenth time, you haven’t lost anything because you were going there anyway.
Wouldn’t safety be an issue, here, too?
Yeah, you might have to require pre-registration to participate—but it also depends what environment you’re in. In small towns or rural areas, it’s likely you’d know the person. But people give rides all the time. In New York City, when you have a transit strike, within hours people are happily sharing cabs and giving people rides.
Let’s assume that we do start traveling this way in the future. How will we look back on our current habits?
I think we’re going to be so, so shocked. “What in heck were we thinking?” It was so incredibly expensive, so wasteful, such high CO2 emissions, so costly from a fuel perspective. And this is really fun. I joke that if there were more ridesharing, we’d never be at a loss for dinner-table conversation.
Would it spell the end of morning radio?
I don’t know, because there’s this thing called slugging in Washington, D.C.—when you put a person into a car so you can travel in the HOV (high-occupancy vehicle) lane. But the rules are that you never, ever talk in the car. I think around carpooling and ridesharing, that’s one of the anxieties we have: Am I going to be too chatty? Am I going to be morose?
Long-distance travel is more of a conundrum. So many good things come out of it, and yet airplane emissions are so bad for the planet.
I’ve been at many meetings where we’ve gone around the table and said, what are the things you’re willing to accommodate to address climate change? And I have to say, I’m pretty much willing to give up everything except that blasted long-distance travel. I can’t figure out how to do it in a low-carbon-footprint way.
You’re not alone, obviously.
I have friends who are doing almost no traveling, and more video conferencing. I gave one talk in Paris via Skype, and it’s hard. I can’t see the audience, so I can’t quite read them. You don’t get sound feedback. Maybe it’s a talent I can get better at.
Globalization is still going strong, and yet there also seem to be efforts—like your ridesharing site—to build local communities. It seems contradictory.
I think there’s going to be so much more diversity in local-ness, and more celebration in local-ness. Those giant new Asian cities—I want to say they’re pasteurized, they all seem the same. I think we’ll be doing with less of that. I don’t think we’re going to see more travel, because ultimately we’ll get to a place where fossil fuel is more expensive and carbon is being charged appropriately and it’s going to make airplane travel incredibly expensive.
That will be painful, but it could be a good thing.
Maybe we’ll have those lovely six-week vacations that we don’t get now, and we’ll go by some other method than airplanes.
You mean a return to the European grand tours people did in the 19th century?
I read John Adams’s biography and it took him six months to go from Massachusetts across the ocean to Paris. So when I think about transportation, there is this bifurcation: the long-distance transportation and the routine transportation. In the U.S., about 92 percent of our trips are in cars. In Europe, it’s about 60-40. And I think if we predict what’s going to happen in the U.S., it’ll be much closer to what’s happening in Europe. We’ll still have car travel, but a much greater number of trips will be taken by foot, bike, or public transit.
President Obama seems serious about building a system of high-speed rail lines. Will that have a big effect on the way we travel?
Not anytime soon, since it takes so darn long to build out. But if we had great inner-city to inner-city rail connections, we would use them.
You live in Cambridge, Mass. How do you get around?
I live in one of those ideal urban areas. I can walk to just about anything. There’s also a subway. And my husband gave me this really cool and ridiculous bike—it has three speeds and it changes gears automatically. I also love to walk, and I adore the subway. It can’t be beat.
They’re talking about making big subway cuts here in New York.
It breaks my heart. It’s happening across the country. The sickening part is when we cut mass transit budgets it makes people think, ‘I have my own car. You can’t screw around with me—I decide my own destiny.’
But cars aren’t always that liberating. Just as often, I feel trapped in them.
In America, we think that cars equal independence. I believe deeply that cars equal dependence. Right now, we’re spending 18 percent of our incomes on our car. The lowest 20 percent of people are paying 35 percent of their incomes on their car. You can’t get a job, you can’t get a glass of milk, you can’t get your kid to school, you can’t go have fun—without your car? That is such incredible dependence. Whereas if we had a good multi-modal system, you’re not having to take this blasted three tons of metal around with you and find a place to put it. And as transit of all kinds becomes more wireless, not being able to work will be another huge cost to driving alone.
Cars are definitely status symbols, though, which makes them hard for some people to give up.
One of the pushbacks I got when we founded Zipcar was: ‘Americans love their cars. It’s their identity.’ But I think we’re getting farther and farther away from that.
Do your kids drive?
I have three kids. Two of them—they’re 18 and 21—don’t know how to drive, and a car is not on their list of status symbols.
I bet you helped persuade them!
The only convincing I did was that I wasn’t an enabler. If they wanted to do it, they had to get themselves down to the DMV and get the permit and whatever else. But they’re city dwellers, and they feel this extreme freedom in the city without a car. As a parent of teenagers, I like that I can pretty much count on the fact that my kids are going to make it through adolescence without dying in a car accident, because they’re never in a car.
What, in your mind, is a global nomad?
You are happy to lay your head just about any place. You maintain your friends across the world in real time, through all the communication channels that we have. Your identity can’t be bound up in your house and your things, because you wouldn’t have those in all the different places that you go. It’s more bound up in your social networks and your online presence.
So nomadism will become increasingly virtual?
The Internet and our increasing use of technology will transform us in a positive way. When a good piece of your day is spent in the physical world, those attributes—what Robin’s wearing at this minute, what kind of car I own, where my house is—matter significantly. But today, a larger percent of our identity is created through virtual space. My identity has to do with things that I write and read and view, and things I think are funny and share with friends. I’m able to create an identity, a sense of self and status, without relying on the consumption of physical goods. And that’s a really great reality—the virtual world as an important outlet for making a sustainable world.
Darrell Hartman, a former assistant editor at Travel + Leisure, has written for Budget Travel, Departures, Style.com, and the travel section of the Chicago Sun-Times. A collection of his writings is at darrellhartman.com.
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