College campuses could be next big market for carsharing

If you’re carless in college on either coast, this could be your lucky week.

A new shared transportation service, Wheelz, just arrived at the University of California, Berkeley, its second campus. In Virginia, George Mason University hopes to expand its fleet of rent-by-hour Zipcars soon.

And these schools represent only the tip of a national car-sharing phenomenon iceberg.

“There are something like three or four hundred 15,000-person campuses in the country, which are effectively little cities,” said Aaron Platson, head of Marketing and Communications at Wheelz. “It’s great to have college students who want to be really pioneers of this, both because they believe in the vision of sustainable transportation and car sharing, but they also just love… a convenient, affordable service.”

Wheelz connects students who have cars that they don’t drive often with students who need to borrow one.

At Berkeley, for example, the company created a fleet of 25 student-owned cars – some trucks and SUVs for versatility, some sports cars for special occasions, all “relatively new” and available about five days a week, Platson said.

“College students so far are a lot less likely to say, what? Who the heck would share their car?” Platson said. “There seem to be a lot of college kids who kind of get it, that sharing an asset that’s sitting there costing them a lot of money makes a lot of sense.”

According to Platson, the average Wheelz car owner at Stanford earns more than $250 per month.

“This is one of those ideas that, when a lot of people hear about it, they go, ‘I can’t believe that doesn’t exist already.’ This is like a no-brainer,” Platson said.

Older car-sharing service Zipcar became a lead investor in Wheelz in February. Already on about 225 U.S. campuses and in cities worldwide, Zipcar lets students rent vehicles by the hour or day, as long as they return them on time.

George Mason University in Virginia has just two Zipcars for 6,000 on-campus students and hopes to install more.

“I think by having the Zipcar, it really allows students to not have to bring a car to campus,” said Josh Cantor, Director of Parking and Transportation at George Mason. “If we can convince students to not bring a car to campus, and to use Zipcar and to use our shuttle, that’s one less parking space that we have to provide, which keeps everyone’s costs down.”

Building and maintaining just one parking deck space costs about $20,000, Cantor said. It also creates unnecessary carbon emissions, not to mention personal frustration.

Mason needs parking, though, because about 75% of students on its Fairfax campus (the university’s largest) commute to school. The university partners with yet another service, Zimride, which sets up carpools between students with the same destination.

But Cantor said it’s the network created by all these options – Zimride, Zipcar, parking and the D.C. Metro – that make a viable modern transit system.

“Not everything is going to work for everybody, so you try to have as many different services and options out there, and then you try to figure out what groups it works with… You try to get people to understand that they have more options than driving alone.”

But the people adopting these options – both students and adults – are still a minority in the U.S.

“I think the market for shared-use systems is really big, and it’s very much untapped at present,” said Susan Shaheen, a professor at UC Berkeley and Director of the Innovative Mobility Research Center. “It’s even difficult to reserve a car because there’s such demand for the existing fleets. Perhaps there’s more to shared-use than traditional ride sharing – it’s carpooling, co-fractional ownership, it could be a lot of different things that could be synergistic and complementary rather than competitive.”

Only about 560,000 Americans were registered with car-sharing services in July 2011 – about one in every 600 people. But in 2008, the U.S. had one car for every pair of citizens.

If students stop relying on their personal cars and start learning to share, that number could drop dramatically, Shaheen said. She’s met people who realized how economical car-sharing was and actually sold their cars to rely on it.

“A campus setting is an interesting place to test because you have a lot of young people, you have a lot of innovative people with ideas who are just getting exposed to mobility,” Shaheen said. “If they have a lot of options available as students, I think they’ll demand those services in the cities they go live in.”

Wheelz has already set its sights on cities, and its next campuses include the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Southern California.

“We will pretty quickly expand from USC and UCLA to the surrounding area, expanding to the college town, but also starting to figure out how we go into downtown San Francisco and broader Los Angeles,” Plaston said. “Colleges are just a place to start.”

Rosalie Murphy is a Spring 2012 USA TODAY Collegiate Correspondent. Learn more about her here.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.