Happy user of Car2Go, Evo and Modo here in Vancouver. Cars are clean, pricing is transparent, the city has very agreements on parking, and so on. I’ve been carless now for 6 months and love it.
Oh, Uber/Lyft is not legal here … and I really could not care less.
I have a slightly less horrific version of Epidermolysis Bullosaso walking about a mile depending on the temp is mostly out of the question if I want to walk again for the rest of the week.
(Google that condition at your own risk, essentially layers of skin on my feet don’t bond as well as normal people so I blister REALLY easily depending on the heat and humidity and I thank the gods that I got the version that only deals with my feed and hands and not the rest of me. Genetics suck.)
I did think of trying lyft once and it was less costly to just drive my car.
Dunno, move to Switzerland and use Mobility? They rock.
I’ve always viewed the current Stock Market as such. Every payday, people automatically put their 401k money into the market, increasing the valuation in spite of whatever may be happening in the real world.
Eventually, people will retire and start drawing on this money, taking it out of the market. At some point, retirees will be drawing out more than people putting in and people will realize how privatization of retirement funds was a bad idea.
I advise everyone to avoid car2go. We used them pretty regularly until my girlfriend was rear-ended in one.
The police showed up. The insurance certificate in the car was expired. When she called their office, the person said they couldn’t find the current one. They weren’t going to do anything and just leave her to deal with it, although the car was disabled in the middle of an intersection (the force of the impact blew all four tires). The police officer was helpful, and told her to just tell them their vehicle was going to be towed if they didn’t get someone down there to take it.
Things got worse from there. They tout that you have insurance while you’re operating their cars, but it didn’t cover her injuries in any way. It appeared to be just liability coverage. I was pretty furious; it seems awful misleading. If someone rents from Hertz, they usually have their own car and insurance they can fall back on. Car2go users as a segment are probably much less likely to own a car and have backup insurance that your rental car customer.
And they didn’t help at all in pursuing a claim against the other driver as real auto insurance would. She spent a year in legal wrangling and ultimately had to file a lawsuit to get her medical expenses covered.
Well that was sort of what i was getting at. That is not what it costs to own or park a car in NYC. That is what it costs to rent or own a dedicated, permanent, specific parking spot for your car.
Short and medium term parking is cheaper, particularly where its municipal. And street parking is a mix of totally free, and free after business hours and on weekends. Rolling with that sort of parking is a hassle, but its cheap. Unless you’re in Manhattan where its impossible. The friends I’ve had with cars in NYC maxed out at about $10/weekday and only if things were particularly busy or they were sick of moving their car for alternate side of the street rules.
You can also contract with a medium term parking lot, the sort of place you might pay for parking for the day or by the hour. And its pricey, but far cheaper than getting your own personal space.
Quite a few of the people I know in NYC have opted to deal with the public and street parking once they found themselves regularly renting cars. Mostly once kids were involved, or a possibility. Because it escalates pretty quickly. Renting a pickup for $120 bucks every time you buy furniture or major appliances, $100 bucks for Costco trips. Every other weekend when you go to see family. If its anything other than occasionally it becomes stupid fast. And you have to add transport to get to said cars on top of it. For the most part even the car shares are in outlying areas away from public transit. Often the airport. So add a $20 cab ride to the cost.
Car shares tend not to be materially cheaper than a full day rental either. They’re just a bit more convenient, and let you book by the hour. Newer ones like car2go might be cheaper haven’t used them. But you aren’t supposed to take them out of town. And they don’t exactly have a lot of space. A uhaul pickup runs 20 bucks plus mileage for a day, and its pretty much as cheap as a rental gets in NYC so its what a lot of people use for routine stuff that comes up like “oh shit I need to buy a bed”. An actual rental car in NYC from the most common place to grab one (Hertz at LaGuardia airport) comes in at over $120 for a single day rental. Plus whatever it takes to get to said car and back.
You end up doing that at least once a month and juggling a car around public parking starts to make a lot of sense.
I obviously don’t like car2go, but I’ll grant that this never happened in Portland. Car2go makes deals with the city everywhere I had used them, and you can park in any spot that’s not specially restricted—no loading zones, or part-time no parking, etc. Metered spots were fair game. I never received a parking ticket in the couple years we used them.
That was another thing I was wondering about. I currently have shared insurance with my wife-soon-be-ex. I will need to remove myself from the shared account. I’ve heard being uninsured for anytime, for any reason, such as not owning a car, will make your premiums bonkers if you try to get insurance in the future.
With some saying it is worth it to get some sort of I-don’t own-a-car insurance and others saying take that money and put it into an interest bearing account to offset the price hike IF you actually need insurance in the future.
But the point you make well here is that the ride share insurance is insufficient if there is an accident. So I guess I will keep something with the current company that covers personal injury.
That’s just what some Seattle drivers said happened after the special parking spots went away. Not sure if it is accurate or not.
What’s the over/under on the amount of public money that will be spent recreating medallion taxi cab infrastructure in hundreds of cities across the nation once these 2 “gig” economy frauds die?
Of course the big question is how to get from here to there. I imagine all the cronies, donors, and wiseguys who own the medallions today are thinking “Ha, this is where I get back what I paid in” and they are not going to just go away. After all, it was the entrenched alliance of medallion owners and city regulators - most of whom are still solidly in place - that showed Uber its market to begin with.
It’s borderline socialistic for the government to say, “This is how many vehicles will be allowed to carry passengers for hire. This many, and no more.”
Yeah, but look at the upside. Think of how many city council members’ kids will get their college funds refreshed.
Definitely. The bad actors aren’t going away and neither are regulators like the NY TLC, who were definitely part of the problem.
In any case, none of the items I listed are impossible. Most of could be implemented via self-enhancing regulation that could be pushed through by a progressive government and enforced by a cleaned-up regulatory agency. Not every politician and public servant is corrupt.
It’s also within the purview of municipal governments to limit congestion and set standards for commercial activities. None of that necessarily puts us on the Road to Serfdom.
Once Uber & Lyft are gone as a result of bancruptcy, will you continue working as a medallion holding taxi driver?
If Uber/Lyft had remained true to their founding premise - that being as an arbitrage against the “command” inefficiencies of medallion supply management by public agencies - then each may have had a chance at long term viability. However, both companies and their investors have been unrelenting in their pursuit to coerce local governments to engage in the socialistic subsidization of Uber & Lyft’s businesses. That and many other bad acts.
Most states have a law against this. Check your state’s insurance commission website. When I moved here as a young man, Allstate tried to pull this on me (I had lived in Europe for 2 years and did not have a car). I luckily bumped into someone who knew the law. The local agent doubled-down on it, but I wrote the company directly and got my money back, along with an apology letter from the president of the company. They can give people a “discount” for having X many years of uninterrupted insurance, but they are not allowed to ding people for being “uninsured” when they had no reason to have car insurance.
That’s great to know. Thank you.
I went from owning a car and fully insured, to not owning a car for ten years to owning a car and being fully insured.
My rates went down. Because I was older, and they charge people in their teens and early 20s ridiculous rates due to increased risk from inexperienced drivers. Not only that but my rates are lower than average for my state, even though I drive 45,000 miles a year or more. And have been in 3 accidents, one car killing, in the last 3 years (occupational hazard).
I can’t imagine where you heard that nugget.
A fair point. Regulatory capture seems to be just about inescapable.
No argument there, except that if the city really wants to limit congestion it should restrict private cars and encourage more flexible forms of public transit (I like jitneys myself).
What the medallion systems were all about was creating artificial shortages to enrich a small minority of the well-connected, and I hope that’s pretty well known by now.
Getting insurance without owning a car is so rare in the US each time I’ve asked insurers about it they either haven’t heard about it or say not to bother, though apparently not all car rentals even come with the minimal coverage that Car2go was supposed to have. AAA is about $150 a year for very basic non-owner policy for people with a clean DMV record. Not sure it would have even helped in your case unless you upped the minimum coverage. And you have to only drive occasionally to qualify for such a policy.
They are allowed, however, to ding people for having interrupted driver’s licenses (in some states parking tickets can get a license suspended - administrative suspensions of various types are a huge hit to all sorts of people and especially those in lower income communities.). So folks should keep their license in good standing even if they don’t own a car and/or are not driving.
