Anyone who reads our posts on local transportation knows that we are big advocates of transit at DCist. Though many DCists are already living la vita auto libre, as DCist Ryan once put it, starting today, we get to give a more detailed account of just what it is like to live car-free in DC.
Car-sharing company Flexcar has teamed up with Metro for the Low-Car Diet, a promotion that challenges us and two dozen other District residents to give up our car keys for a month. Armed with an unlimited SmarTrip Card and 25 hours of free Flexcar, participants are asked to live their lives car-free for 30 days, posting their weekly experiences on Flexcar’s website. The participants represent a fairly diverse cross-section of area residents, each with different commuting needs. Along with offering our own take each week, we’ll give you a survey of other participant reactions as well. Should be interesting!
Car-sharing has been available for a while in the District, offered by Zipcar as well as Flexcar. However, over the last few years, we’ve seen an increasing number of cars on area roads sporting the Flexcar or Zipcar logos. We’ve also seen shared cars with D.C.-tags far afield in places like Delaware beaches and Virginia trailheads. The District also took the unusual step of granting the companies more than a hundred public on-street parking spaces. It is worth noting that, despite the quotes in the Washington Times article linked in the previous sentence, the debate over the merits of the program are much less one-sided, though still controversial. While two parking spaces in a place like Adams Morgan may seem like a big sacrifice for local business in the short term, in a year’s time, it just may turn out that quite a few people in the neighborhood will be able to free themselves of car-ownership as a result, leaving more space for everyone.
While it varies between cities and companies, for an hourly fee generally between $7 and $12, users can reserve and drive cars in the network, which are distributed throughout the metro area. Gas, insurance, and maintenance are all included in the price, and there are discounts if you pre-pay a certain number of hours.
