This is the last in the series of posts from TransForm’s Summit last Saturday. Check out the other posts from this week for more information.
Amy Anton from City CarShare and Jessica ter Schure from Nelson\Nygaard presented their case studies about car sharing in San Francisco developments. Their report is focused on large multi-family projects with unbundled parking, with at least one designated spot for City CarShare. They examined 5 new projects which cater to different types of occupancies (studios, multiple bedrooms, students and families). The report isn’t available online yet, but I’ll be sure to update as soon as it is.
The summary of the report is that carsharing provides a great opportunity to reduce dependence on car ownership, and to reduce to amount of parking built at each project. One aspect I found most surprising was the success rate of the carsharing program. It is very dependent on the amount of parking available at the site. Their basic rule of thumb is that there must be fewer parking spots than units to allow for built in demand. I would have thought that fewer people would own cars given the large size of the developments, but apparently not enough demand was present. This is rather important given the new Planning Department regulation that requires carsharing when more than 50 units are built.
I enjoyed learning more about the practical side of the City CarShare program, and how it relates to building planning. It’s really important to know what types of projects actually make it profitable for both the car company and the developer, because we need more options in our building. One variation that I found particularly interesting is in Berkeley, where city employees use the cars during the day, then share them in the evenings. We need to explore all options, because our cities have been developed to facilitate auto travel – and that’s not going away any time soon. Until then, we can mitigate the damage, and design for a future after personal automobiles.
Comments
Leave a Reply
