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Flexcar was an American vehicle subscription company with headquarters located in Boston, Massachusetts.
In January 2000, the Flexcar service was launched to 100 members served by four cars in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. The company targeted drivers who made occasional use of a vehicle as well as drivers who wanted occasional access to a vehicle of a different type than they use day-to-day. Flexcar claimed that the service was economically beneficial to anyone whose car would be away from their home about 15 hours a week and did not need a car for their daily commute to work.
In several of its cities, the company had formed a public–private partnership with local public transit entities. For example, in Seattle, they were partnered with King County Metro Transit, which operates the area's buses.[ citation needed ]
In April 2001, Flexcar became the first car-sharing company in the U.S. to expand to a second city by acquiring CarSharing Portland in Portland. At the time, Flexcar's customer base in Seattle included over 1300 members sharing 40 cars. Carsharing Portland, which began business in March 1998, had at the time of its acquisition over 500 members with 25 vehicles in and around downtown Portland.
The company also started[ when? ] an initiative to convince Downtown Seattle employers to join their program as business members rather than maintaining their own fleet vehicles. Other market segments included placing vehicles at transit stations to provide "last mile" connectivity between transit and suburban office locations and providing subsidized vehicle access as part of low-income "jobs access" programs.
In August 2005, Revolution LLC, the holding company owned by Steve Case, founder of America Online, purchased a 60% holding interest in Flexcar. The company announced that this investment would lead to a rapid expansion of their operations. [1]
In January 2007, Flexcar changed their billing structure of their hourly rentals. These changes replaced their flat fee for a variable pricing plan, which calculated cost on peak and non-peak hours with mileage limited to 150 miles per day. Members were notified on the organization's website and by letter that, "[v]ariable pricing provides two benefits. Members with flexible schedules can now save money by reserving the car during its 'off-peak' time, in this case, on the weekend. Because some members will shift their trips to 'off-peak' times, the car’s availability should also improve during its 'peak' times as well."
On October 30, 2007, Flexcar executives announced a merger with car-sharing rival Zipcar. The merger consolidated the operations of the two corporations. Executives from both companies, in the announcement of the merger, stated that the Flexcar headquarters in Seattle would be closed, possibly resulting in the loss of jobs as operations transferred to Zipcar's headquarters in Boston. [2]
Light rail is a form of passenger urban rail transit using rolling stock derived from tram technology while also having some features from heavy rapid transit.
A high-occupancy vehicle lane is a restricted traffic lane reserved for the exclusive use of vehicles with a driver and at least one passenger, including carpools, vanpools, and transit buses. These restrictions may be only imposed during peak travel times or may apply at all times. There are different types of lanes: temporary or permanent lanes with concrete barriers, two-directional or reversible lanes, and exclusive, concurrent, or contraflow lanes working in peak periods.
Congestion pricing or congestion charges is a system of surcharging users of public goods that are subject to congestion through excess demand, such as through higher peak charges for use of bus services, electricity, metros, railways, telephones, and road pricing to reduce traffic congestion; airlines and shipping companies may be charged higher fees for slots at airports and through canals at busy times. Advocates claim this pricing strategy regulates demand, making it possible to manage congestion without increasing supply.
Bus rapid transit (BRT), also referred to as a busway or transitway, is a bus-based public transport system designed to have much more capacity, reliability, and other quality features than a conventional bus system. Typically, a BRT system includes roadways that are dedicated to buses, and gives priority to buses at intersections where buses may interact with other traffic; alongside design features to reduce delays caused by passengers boarding or leaving buses, or paying fares. BRT aims to combine the capacity and speed of a light rail transit (LRT) or mass rapid transit (MRT) system with the flexibility, lower cost and simplicity of a bus system.
The Green Line is a semi-metro system run by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) in the Boston, Massachusetts, metropolitan area. It is the oldest MBTA subway line, and with tunnel sections dating from 1897, the oldest subway in North America. It runs underground through downtown Boston, and on the surface into inner suburbs via six branches on radial boulevards and grade-separated alignments. With an average daily weekday ridership of 137,700 in 2019, it is the third-most heavily used light rail system in the country. The line was assigned the green color in 1967 during a systemwide rebranding because several branches pass through sections of the Emerald Necklace of Boston.
Carsharing or car sharing or car clubs (UK) is a model of car rental where people rent cars for short periods of time, often by the hour. It differs from traditional car rental in that the owners of the cars are often private individuals themselves, and the car sharing facilitator is generally distinct from the car owner. Car sharing is part of a larger trend of shared mobility.
King County Metro, officially the King County Metro Transit Department and often shortened to Metro, is the public transit authority of King County, Washington, which includes the city of Seattle. It is the eighth-largest transit bus agency in the United States. In 2023, the system had a ridership of 78,121,600, or about 256,200 per weekday as of the first quarter of 2024. Metro employs 2,477 full-time and part-time operators and operates 1,540 buses.
Zipcar is an American car-sharing company and a subsidiary of Avis Budget Group. Zipcar provides vehicle reservations to its members, billable by the minute, hour or day; members may have to pay a monthly or annual membership fee in addition to car reservations charges. Gas, maintenance, insurance options, and a dedicated parking spot are included. Zipcar was founded in 2000 by Antje Danielson and Robin Chase.
Transportation in Seattle is largely focused on the automobile like many other cities in western North America; however, the city is just old enough for its layout to reflect the age when railways and trolleys predominated. These older modes of transportation were made for a relatively well-defined downtown area and strong neighborhoods at the end of several former streetcar lines, now mostly bus lines.
Like transportation in the rest of the United States, the primary mode of local transportation in Portland, Oregon is the automobile. Metro, the metropolitan area's regional government, has a regional master plan in which transit-oriented development plays a major role. This approach, part of the new urbanism, promotes mixed-use and high-density development around light rail stops and transit centers, and the investment of the metropolitan area's share of federal tax dollars into multiple modes of transportation. In the United States, this focus is atypical in an era when automobile use led many areas to neglect their core cities in favor of development along interstate highways, in suburbs, and satellite cities.
Portland is "an international pioneer in transit orientated developments."
Transportation in Vancouver, British Columbia, has many of the features of modern cities worldwide. Unlike many large metropolises, Vancouver has no freeways into or through the downtown area. A proposed freeway through the downtown was rejected in the 1960s by a coalition of citizens, community leaders and planners. This event "signalled the emergence of a new concept of the urban landscape" and has been a consistent element of the city's planning ever since.
Washington, D.C. has a number of different modes of transportation available for use. Commuters have a major influence on travel patterns, with only 28% of people employed in Washington, D.C. commuting from within the city, whereas 33.5% commute from the nearby Maryland suburbs, 22.7% from Northern Virginia, and the rest from Washington, D.C.'s outlying suburbs.
Streetcar was the largest carsharing/car club company in the United Kingdom, established in 2004, which merged with the American company Zipcar in 2010, following a period of investment by Smedvig Capital.
Streetcars or trolley(car)s were once the chief mode of public transit in hundreds of North American cities and towns. Most of the original urban streetcar systems were either dismantled in the mid-20th century or converted to other modes of operation, such as light rail. Today, only Toronto still operates a streetcar network essentially unchanged in layout and mode of operation.
The Rose City Transit Company was a private company that operated most mass transit service in the city of Portland, Oregon, from 1956 to 1969. It operated only within the city proper. Transit services connecting downtown Portland with suburbs outside the city but within the Portland metropolitan area were run by other private companies, mainly a consortium of four companies known collectively as the "Blue Bus" lines.
Scott Griffith was the chairman and chief executive officer of Zipcar, Inc. from February 2003 until his resignation on March 15, 2013, following the acquisition of Zipcar by Avis Budget Group. As of October 2020, Griffith is the CEO of Ford Autonomous Vehicles & Mobility Businesses at Ford Motor Company.
San Francisco congestion pricing is a proposed traffic congestion user fee for vehicles traveling into the most congested areas of the city of San Francisco at certain periods of peak demand. The charge would be combined with other traffic reduction projects. The proposed congestion pricing charge is part of a mobility and pricing study being carried out by the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (SFCTA) to reduce congestion at and near central locations and to reduce its associated environmental impacts, including cutting greenhouse gas emissions. The funds raised through the charge will be used for public transit improvement projects, and for pedestrian and bike infrastructure and enhancements.
UhaulCarShare was a for-profit carsharing service offered by U-Haul in nearly 40 cities in the United States until the program was shut down in February 2020 just ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic. Those with a UhaulCarShare membership had use of a car, billable by the hour or by the day. However, use was limited to three days at a time. Most often, Uhaul Car Share vehicles were operated in communities with colleges and/or universities nearby. "The goal of [Uhaul] Car Share [was] to give people an alternative to owning second and third cars, and to increase the use of public transit."
Shared transport or shared mobility is a transportation system where travelers share a vehicle either simultaneously as a group or over time as personal rental, and in the process share the cost of the journey, thus purportedly creating a hybrid between private vehicle use and mass or public transport. It is a transportation strategy that allows users to access transportation services on an as-needed basis. Shared mobility is an umbrella term that encompasses a variety of transportation modes including carsharing, Bicycle-sharing systems, ridesharing companies, carpools, and microtransit.
ReachNow was a carsharing service operated by BMW Group in Seattle, Portland, and Brooklyn. It launched in 2016 and it shut down its services in Seattle and Portland on July 17, 2019. It used a mobile app for car reservations and operated a fleet of over 1,000 vehicles. It was one of three car-sharing services in the city of Seattle, competing with car2go and Zipcar. ReachNow was similar to another BMW Group service DriveNow, but was focused on North American cities starting with Seattle. Unlike DriveNow which is a joint-venture with Sixt, ReachNow is a fully owned BMW subsidiary, with RideCell rather than Sixt, providing the technology platform.
