Photo credit: Jaypeg @ flickr

Peer-to-peer (“P2P”) car-sharing is gathering some major mainstream steam in New England and the rest of the country. RelayRides, originally founded in Cambridge and now one of the major players in the P2P car-sharing space, has officially begun a partnership with General Motor’s OnStar service that will give millions of vehicle owners the ability to start making money off their vehicle in seconds. The new partnership has the potential to benefit not only the region’s environment, but also its economy and residents – cars owners and not, alike.

For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, P2P car-sharing works by providing a platform, usually a web-based car-sharing service, that connects renters with a short-term need for a vehicle directly to a vehicle owner willing to rent out their personal vehicle for a fee. In areas where it is available, P2P car-sharing provides financial benefits for all parties involved. Renters avoid the high costs of vehicle ownership while still having access to a vehicle for an hourly rate when needed. The car-sharing service collects a percentage of the vehicle owner’s rental revenue and gains access to a fleet of rental vehicles without incurring the huge capital costs involved in running a traditional car rental service. Meanwhile, vehicle owners can defray their own costs of ownership by collecting rental revenue during the time that their vehicle would otherwise sit unused.

In addition to being a potential boon for vehicle owners, the widespread adoption of P2P car-sharing could also have environmental benefits. A recent study by UC-Berkeley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center suggests that car-sharing reduces household vehicle ownership by both allowing households that own multiple vehicles to shed one or more and also deterring carless households from ever purchasing a vehicle. Environmental advocates hope that this reduction in household vehicle ownership will reduce the carbon footprint of transportation by resulting in a lower number of total vehicle miles traveled (“VMT”) and a decrease in traffic congestion.

The new RelayRides/OnStar partnership has the potential to take P2P car-sharing beyond the daydreams of ardent environmentalists. Having already invested an undisclosed sum in RelayRides’ early round venture financing, General Motors (“GM”) doubled down on their investment by giving RelayRides members integrated web-access to their network of nearly 6 million GM vehicles with active OnStar subscriptions. OnStar subscribers with an eligible GM vehicle will be able to sign up for RelayRides online through their OnStar account and allow members, with an approved reservation, to instantly unlock their vehicle using either a smartphone app or by replying to a text message.

The new web-access technology streamlines the P2P car-sharing experience, removing the need for renters and vehicle owners to arrange to meet in person and exchange keys. In addition, many OnStar equipped vehicles include theft-prevention technology that can block a vehicle’s ignition or force it to slow to a stop and theft recovery technology that includes pinpoint location through GPS. GM hopes the added security and convenience of the partnership will create an added incentive for subscription to or renewal of their OnStar service while RelayRides hopes the new technology will help differentiate it from competitors and increase membership.

As highlighted by the liability issues surrounding a fatal accident recently covered by the New York Times, there are still kinks to be worked out in the P2P car-sharing model. These include things like clarifying how car-sharing will be treated for insurance liability purposes.  Despite these uncertainties, the partnership between GM and RelayRides could be a major step towards bringing P2P car-sharing closer to mainstream acceptance. Clf is hopeful that support from one of the world’s largest automakers is a good sign both for the burgeoning P2P car-sharing market and the environment as a whole.

This Orange Line car is clearly past its expiration date. (Photo credit: Hannah Cabot)

Tuesday morning, CLF Staff Attorney Rafael Mares was testifying at the Massachusetts State House against several bills that seek to reduce, eliminate, or otherwise limit tolls on the state’s highways, which serve as a significant source of transportation revenue. While the sentiment of wanting to decrease commuters’ transportation expenditures was noble, Mares said, “we cannot afford to reduce our already inadequate transportation revenues at this time, given the significant financial and physical challenges facing our state transportation system.” One of those challenges, he said, was the MBTA’s aging subway cars.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the river, there were 447 Red Line commuters on a train between the Porter and Harvard Square stations who knew exactly what he meant. Their six-car train broke down around 9 a.m., leaving its passengers stranded in the dark tunnel for at least two hours before rescue efforts began. The passengers were evacuated on foot, with the last emerging around 12:30 p.m., 3 1/2 hours after the initial breakdown.

This event may serve as the latest and some of the most troubling evidence of the MBTA’s funding deficit, but it certainly doesn’t stand alone.

“All 120 Orange Line cars are well past their intended lifespan,” Mares stated in his testimony. “Manufacturers build subway cars to last 25 years, provided they receive a mid-life overhaul to refurbish or replace major elements such as propulsion systems, brakes, lighting and ventilation. None of the now over 30-year-old Orange Line cars has been overhauled.

“These aging subway cars are challenging the MBTA’s ability to run a full set of trains each day, causing longer waits on platforms and more frequent service interruptions. A similar problem exists with one third of the Red Line cars, which as the Globe reported, ‘were pressed into service during Richard Nixon’s first term, and have not been overhauled for a quarter century.’ Neither their replacement nor the expansive band-aid of $100 million to keep the Orange and Red Line trains running is currently in the MBTA’s Capital Improvement Plan, which covers the next five years.”

However, tolls or no tolls, it’s clear that maintaining and expanding a functional transportation system in Massachusetts will require more funding from a more diverse portfolio of funding sources, and CLF is working with transportation experts, local legislators and community groups as part of the Transportation for Massachusetts (T4MA) coalition to articulate what some of those options would look like. Learn more about CLF’s work on transportation funding here.

Throughout human history one overarching story has been that as our society became wealthier we traveled more. The reality that our ancestors generally were born, lived and died in the same place with rare opportunities to “see the world” is hard to deny – so is the reality of our world where it is not unusual to find people walking the streets of our cities who woke up that morning on a different continent and rubbing elbows with masses of people who have lived, gone to school and worked in a wide and complex array of places.

But new academic research is suggesting that the upward surge in travel that has become such a feature of our world may have come to an end.

This could be very similar to well documented phenomena of air pollution rising as a society becomes more wealthy but then reaching a point where the relationship between economic activity (or income) flips -   air pollution increasingly declines as wealth/income rises.  This is know as an “inverted U-Shaped Kuznets curve” by economists (who are almost as poetic when they name things as lawyers).  This analysis suggests that as income rises people collectively take action to reduce pollution.  There is some controversy about applying this principle to pollution that is not as visible and obvious – like the Carbon Dioxide (CO2) that is a major cause of global warming, but some scholars believe that as income and wealth rises that emissions of CO2 drop very suddenly after a critical break point under some conditions.

But the possibility that we may have passed a critical “break point” where travel stops growing would be very good news in terms of slowing and reversing global warming given the critical role of the transportation sector in the emissions of these greenhouse gases – and the major role that travel growth plays in driving (pun intended) such emissions.

These trends are not handed down from above though – whenever we choose to build communities where people can walk, bike or even drive short distances to their offices, schools, stores, friends and families who move our world in a positive direction.  And when we build good transit systems that allow us to move around those communities quickly and cleanly everyone benefits.