Robin Chase on the Birth of Zipcar and the Future of Transportation (Part One)

TreeHugger: I have heard you say that driving is under priced and over consumed, and that we need better market feedback to realize the true cost of driving. How do we tap into better market feedback?

Chase: Some of that is going to happen and is happening. One is parking, for example. It is enormously under priced, except not in rural areas where land has negligible value. But in places that have urbanized even a little, and particularly in cities where they have urbanized a lot, we have dramatically under priced parking.

And cities are beginning to figure that out. My favorite example of under priced parking is in Boston on Beacon Hill, which is a very fancy, very dense part of town. You can park with a Boston Residence sticker for zero dollars a year. You get your 120 square feet that your car occupies on street. But if you were to rent an open air space in that part of town, it is about $600 a month. And if you were to buy an open air parking spot, the most expensive parking spot ever bought in Boston on Beacon Hill was for $250,000.

So if we think of cash-strapped cities cutting down afterschool programs, it is truly ridiculous that we let people park on street for zero dollars a year. That is a public asset that has a significant value. And we let it go.

And even your parking meter at a dollar an hour—four quarters or six quarters—if you compare that to garage parking where you are paying $10 to $20 a hit, again it is ridiculous.

Which is more valuable to us as users of a city? On-street parking is much more important and has many more uses than off-street garage parking, yet we have those price signals reversed. It should be cheaper to park in a parking garage where you have to go up three flights than the on-street parking right outside the store.

There are more and more experiments to change that cost of parking. There are a couple of really weird disincentives. If you’ve got a car that you never use, then you have to let it sit there, right? In the meantime, there are people who do need a car everyday that can't find a spot, because your parking is free and you are just having your car sit there.

If we even just had monthly parking payments to the city for residential permits, that would change some of the demand right away. When I have my clunker that is sitting out there, I would not want to pay $20 a month for it to sit there.

The second strange incentive is how we finance our road infrastructure: we rely on gas taxes. And that gas tax hasn't been changed since 1993. So we are all enjoying roads paid for with 15-year-old dollars.

There is nothing else that we buy that we are paying 15-year-old prices for. Yet we do that with our cars. This is a trauma across the United States. Every single state is in crisis over the lack of money; the gas tax inadequacy.

So state by state, they are coming up with solutions for how to get enough money to maintain roads and bridges so they don't crumble to the ground, which is what is happening across the country.

So we are going to see significant price rise there. Carbon taxes, whether it comes in through the cap and trade route or another way, we will see some of those externalities incorporated.

Congestion pricing: many cities are starting to talk about that. So all of these things are adding up. And I am sorry if I said this before, but I will say it again: the average American spends 18% of their income on their car. And when we add these things up, it will go to 23-25% of your income, which is a pretty darn tight squeeze.

And if we go to the lowest fifth of Americans, the lowest quintile of income earners, today it is about 30% of their income and it will rise to about 40% of their income. And that is truly not tenable.

So we need to wean ourselves from an extreme car-dependent society, because it is not viable in the nearest term. I didn't even talk about what happens when gas goes back up to four or five dollars a gallon; what that does to your percent of income.

So one of every five hours you work pays off your car. But in reality it is the first hour. Or for low income people it is the first three hours of the day that goes to pay off their car, because they can't get to work without it.

So that is a really dangerous situation to have our society built in, because it is untenable and means that we are having to use our money in these ways when we would much prefer to pay for education, healthcare, vacations, and food. But we are squeezed because you can't earn another dime if you don't pay for that car first.