The pilot will allocate up to 150 spaces (0.05% of the total on-street spaces in San Francisco) to carsharing. Only two spaces per block at most will be allocated.

In order for peer-to-peer cars to be included, they must be available for use by the general public 75% of the time. How this is enforced or monitored is not indicated.

On-street carsharing Zones

Additionally, carsharing organizations must allocate a minimum percentage of cars to the less-dense areas of San Francisco. These ares are typically poorly served by traditional carsharing companies (City CarShare and Zipcar) as they have less density, higher car ownership rates and thus less demand for carsharing. A minimum of 15% of spaces must be allocated to Zone 2 and 15% to Zone 3.

Zone 2 includes the dense, carsharing friendly Upper Haight, which is where I expect all of the required Zone 2 spaces to be allocated. Zone 3 may see the required cars being allocated near SF State or possibly along the edge in the Inner Sunset.

The plan requires carsharing organizations to do community outreach to recruit new embers, provide a summary of the outreach and to provide data on usage to SFMTA.

The full draft:

Innovation, by its nature, does not always fit within existing structures. Although we’ve been careful to ensure the protections offered to our member community comply with legal frameworks around the country, we learned in conversations with the NY Department of Financial Services that it believes there is noncompliance with certain unique aspects of NY insurance law.

Relay Rides website now announces “RelayRides has car rentals across the country, except New York.”

Pando Daily suggests that this may not have much chilling effect on the industry: Relay Rides is still going strong in California, Massachussets, Pennsylvania, DC, Georgia, Washington, Oregon, Illinois, Colorado and Texas and more. Just last week, they acquired rival peer-to-peer carsharing company Wheelz. Getaround, the other major peer-to-peer car rental company, does not offer service in New York state and so isn’t affected by this issue. Peer-to-peer carsharing will continue to grow, but New York will be missing out on innovative transportation options. Startups in the transportation space may look elsewhere when considering where to locate.

The big gain for RelayRides appears to be in acquiring Wheelz’s “DriveBox” technology, which enables a renter to unlock a vehicle using a smartphone, so renters and car owners don’t have to meet in person to hand off the keys.

read more on Pando Daily »

The article talks about why medallions are outdated:

When this medallion system was introduced in New York City in 1937, there were 11,787 issued. That number remained constant unti 2004. Today there are 13,150.

The economics of being a taxi driver:

UCLA professors Gary Blasi and Jacqueline Leavitt found that taxi drivers work on average 72 hours a week for a median take home wage of $8.39 per hour.

The transformation from medallions to free market:

According to publicly available statements from ride-sharing companies, there is strong evidence that there are already more community drivers on the road than regular taxis in San Francisco. In San Francisco, the transformation from a medallion constrained taxi system to a free market is nearly complete. These ride-sharing companies are all rapidly expanding across the country.

The government’s reaction:

“These medallions are public assets. The value belongs to the people of San Francisco for the benefit of the transportation system.”
- Ed Reiskin, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Director

“I really hope we keep the medallion system and get rid of ride-sharing apps.”
- No one who uses San Francisco Municipal Transportation, ever

Read more on priceonomics »

Project 100 will include carsharing with Teslas and low range electrical vehicles, bikesharing, on-demand rides, party busses and potentially helicopters.  The program is unique in that it will offer access to multiple modes of transportation with one membership.  Their goal is to attract people to the downtown community and offer a service which exceeds the utility of car ownership at the same price.  The exact membership and pricing structure hasn’t been determined but it will be interesting to watch the project and see what types of innovative and crazy transportation options they come up with.

Zipcar requires roundtrip rentals, so this means that airport Zipcars are only suitable for short trips.  For someone visiting New York for a weekend (and needing a car) it may be a perfect option.  Currently, Zipcar offers small sedans (Nissan Sentra, Honda Civic) at $12/hour or $89/day.

San Francisco already has two airport carsharing options – DriveNow and FlightCar.  DriveNow allows one-way car trips from Oakland or SFO airport to locations downtown SF, Palo Alto and Mountain View using electric BMWs.  This allows for more flexibility than Zipcar’s roundtrip requirement as you don’t have to pay for the car once you’ve arrived at your destination.  FlightCar is a peer-to-peer car sharing service that  currently serves SFO.  Like other peer-to-peer carsharing services, it offers a wide variety of vehicle types and will pick you up curbside.  FlightCar’s pricing is less than traditional car rental companies, and it allows you to skip the lines and paperwork associated with airport car rental.

Zipcar’s move to offer airport carsharing locations is one of the first noticeable changes to its service since being acquired by Avis.  The airport lots where Zipcars are parked are Avis car rental locations.

San Francisco taxi origins and destinations, with magnitude blobs by Eric Fischer

The San Francisco board of supervisors will vote on a law that will require all taxis to transmit their locations to a central system. Additionally, all apps based on hailing cabs (UberTaxi, Taxi Magic, Flywheel) would be required to use the network.

This will have a few effects:

• Create a great new source of data about cab demand and supply for SFMTA to use when deciding how to regulate cabs and potentially allow additional cabs.
• Enlarge the pool of cabs hailable via apps
• Remove app companies ability to regulate which drivers are allowed into their systems, potentially decreasing driver quality and passenger experience

SFist puts it best:

A good number of our cab drivers are unprofessional bigots and goons who don’t represent well for their ilk, smoking in their own cabs, refusing to take credit cards, being homophobic, and refusing to drive to the Sunset and elsewhere.

Uber Taxi charges an additional $1 on top of the cab cost and tip to use its service for hailing a cab. One benefit to using Uber Taxi is that it has vetted drivers and will remove drivers with low ratings from its service. If uber was required to use all San Francisco taxi drivers, no matter how bad thier rating was, there would be less incentive to use uber over other taxi hailing apps.

On the flip side, you can rent someone elses car for substantially less than traditional rental rates and have the car delivered to your at the airport on arrival, skipping the shuttles, lines and paperwork associated with renting a car.

FlightCar manages the pickup, storage, delivery and cleaning of the vehicle both before a renter receives the car and after the rental is complete. Both the owner and renter get picked up and can drop the car off curbside to a FlightCar valet. FlightCar also has insurance lined up to protect the owners car, in much the same way peer-to-peer carsharing companies Getaround, Relay Rides and Wheelz handle this. This video explains FlightCar with some nice illustrations.

FlightCar currently supports one airport (SFO) and a quick search on their site revealed several cars available for rent next week ranging from $28-$41 day. FlightCar says that the cheapest cars will be available for $13/day. These prices are inclusive of taxes, fees and insurance, so they represent real savings over traditional car rental agencies. My searches also revealed a wider variety of vehicles than normally available through car rental agencies including several Mini-vans. Higher capacity vehicles like minivans are normally much more expensive to rent than normal sedans at traditional car rental agencies.

FlightCar rentals are limited to 90 miles per day (averaged across the entire rental) so they won’t work out as well for cross-country adventures. Additional miles are $0.35/mile. Additional drivers can be added for $10/each. Renters pay for gas and are expected to bring back vehicles with the same amount of fuel as when they started.

Interestingly, renters between 18-25 can rent FlightCars with no additional charge, as long as the vehicles value is under $40,000. This is a major win for younger renters who are generally excluded or charged extremely high surcharges at traditional car rental places.

Flightcar raised $570,000 in seed funding and is part of YCombinator. Their disruptive startup has a lot of potential, but may hit snags with regulation or get in fights with entrenched airport ground transportation interests. Ensuring that all transactions with travelers who may be in a rush go smoothly is important (although traditional car rental companies are not always known for making smooth or efficient transactions). Ensuring enough staff to pickup, dropoff, park and clean cars may be a challenge at peak times or when travelers schedules or flight plans change.

The New York Times reports that Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said that Uber will start to incorporate ridesharing into its app in California.

Including Uber, there will be four peer-to-peer ridesharing services in San Francisco: Lyft, Sidecar and Tickengo being the other three.

The Colorado Public Utilities Commission has proposed regulations that will make transportaion services like Uber effectively illegal (or too costly to be viable).

• Non-taxis can only be chartered by time, not distance (section 6301)
• Non-taxis can not be located with 200 feet of a hotel, motel, restaurant airport, or bar, effectively excluding non-taxis from dense areas of cities (section 6309)
• “partnering with local sedan companies will be prohibited” – not exactly sure how this is interpreted, but it sounds bad (section 6001 ff)

It will be interesting to see how this proceed. At this point, Uber has become fairly accepted in most other major US cities, after several other legal battles.