Flexcar
Flexcar is a for-profit car sharing company, the oldest and largest in the United States. Flexcar can date its origins to March 1998, when its Portland, Oregon office was founded as a separate company; Flexcar itself was founded in January 2000 in Seattle, Washington. Flexcar is also present in Los Angeles; San Diego; and Washington, D.C., and, to varying degrees, in their suburbs.
Flexcar members chose a rate plan and pay an annual fee. The fees charges cover gasoline, insurance, maintenance, and cleaning. The vehicles are mostly late-model sedans, with other types, such as light trucks and minivans, also available. Each vehicle has a home location, a reserved space either in a parking lot or on a street, typically in a highly-populated urban neighborhood. Members reserve a car by web or telephone and use a key card to access the vehicle. The reservation must specify the pick up and return time, so others can schedule the vehicle. Vehicles are returned to their home location.
The company targets people who make only occasional use of a vehicle as well as people who would like occasional access to a vehicle of a different type than they use day-to-day. Flexcar claims that the service should be economically beneficial to anyone whose car would normally be away from their home about 15 hours a week, and do not need a car for their daily commute to work.
In several of its cities, the company has formed a public-private partnership with a local public transit entity. For example, in Seattle they are partnered with King County Metro Transit, which operates the area's buses. The company's advertising materials there say, "Ride Metro when you don't need a car. Use Flexcar when you do."
Seattle
Flexcar has 15,000 members in Seattle, over 3% of that city's population. It has proven popular among those who live in downtown Seattle or the nearby densely populated Capitol Hill and First Hill.
The company has also started an initiative to convince Downtown Seattle employers to join their program as business members rather than maintaining their own car fleets. Other market segments include placing vehicles at transit stations to provide "last mile" connectivity between transit and suburban office locations and, most recently, providing subsidized vehicle access as part of low-income "jobs access" programs.
Portland
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 most recently statistics provided by Flexcar's website as of May 2005 show that the service in Portland has grown to include over 5,000 members and 70 vehicles, including the Pearl District, Old Town/Chinatown, close-in east side neighborhoods such as the Lloyd District, Hawthorne and Brooklyn, and downtown Vancouver, Washington.
Competitors
Carsharing companies providing similar services include
- Communauto (founded in 1994 and the oldest company in North America)
- City Carshare in San Francisco (a non-profit)
- Zipcar, serving multiple cities on the East Coast of the US
- Philly Carshare
- I-Go Cars, Chicago