Sharing, I think most of us properly socialized folks would agree, is nice. But it's entirely possible that it may also be necessary if we want out cities to continue to grow, thrive and even survive.

 

There have been some 1960s and '70s pictures of downtown Toronto making the Twitter rounds recently. Almost everyone who's commented on them has said the same thing: look at all those parking lots. Behind the Gooderham building, around the base of Yonge Street, all along Bay Street—spots for hundreds and hundreds of cars. Since the 1990s, all over the city, allowances for cars have been disappearing, making room for people in a city, like most others around the world, that's been increasing in density.

 

With all these new people downtown who didn't used to be, and 132 towers worth of them coming down the pipeline in the next few years, Eric Miller, director of the University of Toronto's Cities Centre, points out an obvious but inconvenient truth. "Cars take up a lot of space." Not only on our streets, but in parking spaces, gas stations, car washes, dealerships and fix-it shops.

 

Miller is one of the organizers of this week's Toronto Talks Mobility, aimed generating ideas to remedy Toronto's congestion problems and improve transportation options. We need it. At an average of 80 minutes, Torontonians' have some of the worst commute times on the continent. And various problems associated with congestion, including lost work hours, cost the city $6 billion a year. 

 

You could just tell everyone cars are bad and to ride pure, wholesome, farm-fresh bikes instead. But cars are useful, sometimes necessary. So the question is not how to get rid of them, but how to reduce our use of them while at the same time not restricting that valuable convenience to the rich.

 

Seventeen years ago, Torontonian Kevin McLaughlin, an ecological activist from a redoubtable Canadian automotive family (an ancestor founded the Canadian McLaughlin car company that became a foundational part of General Motors), read about some Germans who had started sharing their cars as early as the 1960s. The concept is simple, a slightly more capital-intensive version of the town bike. One organization, a co-op or a company, buys a bunch of cars, finds places to park them around the city and sells memberships. Members then sign up at a central registry of some sort—these days, it's all online—to book a car in their neighbourhood when they need it.

 

"I really liked the idea," McLaughlin says, connecting it with his own activist background as one of the founders of Evergreen.ca. So when he ran into Vancouver-based transportation activist Tracey Axelsson at a transportation conference back in the 1990s, he put his name on her "Who wants to start a car-sharing co-op?" sign-up sheet. McLaughlin was the only one who did, though. Things spluttered along until he moved back to Toronto. With partner Liz Reynolds, he created Autoshare, basing it largely on Communauto, the Quebec company that was the first car-sharing operation on this continent.

 

"The original motivation was to create a green business," he says, "a market-based solution that could provide an alternative to owning a car in the city."

 

Autoshare launched in 1998 with three cars and 16 members. They now have 240 cars and 10,000 members, all in Toronto. It's a success by most metrics, but McLaughlin has had to come to terms with the fact that his company (he and Reynolds parted ways acrimoniously in 2002) has grown in spite, rather than because of his founding principles. When he started out, there was a $500 membership deposit that gave Autoshare its capital, and made the whole operation a co-operative, giving its members a sense of ownership. The fee has since fallen to competitive pressure. He started out with explicitly environmental goals, and though car sharing is environmentally friendly, that's not the reason most people join up—it's about saving money. He also was hoping it would be an alternative to car ownership for people who traditionally have not been able to afford cars. But Autoshare started out and remains, he admits, almost entirely a middle-class operation.

 

They also have some competition now. Zipcar, the US answer to car-sharing, put out its Toronto shingle in 2006. It now has about 385 cars in about 200 locations across the city. (That's down a bit from the 435 cars it had a few months ago; Zipcar keeps its local membership numbers secret, though it will tout its total membership of 605,000 in Canada, the US and the UK). That's a lot of shared cars in one city (though we've got a ways to go to catch up to New York, which has more than 2,000).

 

Still, driving, as anyone who's driven and stopped can attest, is habit-forming. If you've got a car in your driveway, or downstairs in the parkade, you'll probably drive up Spadina for that meeting at Ezra's Pound. But the car-sharing phenomenon suggests that ownership, rather than mere access, is a major factor in our transportation decisions. People who have put the convenience of driving at a slight remove are much more likely to hop the streetcar, pedal a bike (their own or a Bixi) or walk. According to Zipcar studies, members report a 46 per cent increase in public transit trips, a 26 per cent increase in walking trips and a 10 per cent increase in cycling trips after they sign up. Vehicle kilometres traveled by members is reduced by an average of 50 per cent for car owners who switch to sharing. A study commissioned by Zipcar and conducted by market research consultants Frost and Sullivan, says that for every Zipcar in a city (and, one assumes, for every Autoshare car), 15 owned vehicles are removed from the roads.

 

Christian Demers, Zipcar's new general manager, also sees the service as "an alternative to car ownership rather than car rental." That's led the company to move into areas where the potential for automotive reduction is even more intense than it is among urban residential communities. For about five years, Zipcar has had a corporate program that allows companies to offer its employees free access to the fleet for short work trips, reducing or even eliminating the need for leased corporate fleets. As well, with their 21-year-old membership age limit (Autoshare's is 23, down from its original 25), they have also moved into the college and university communities, with six cars on the York campus and mini-lots dotted all around U of T, Ryerson, Seneca, George Brown and Humber.

 

One of Western culture's most famous misquotes is "Money is the root of all evil." What it actually says in 1 Timothy 6:10 is "The love of money is the root of all evil." Despite what bicycle activists and environmentalists often claim, cars are not bad things. It's possible to construct a hierarchy of purity in transportation, placing cars at the bottom, with mass transit one step above, and cycling a step above that. But what a healthy and operational city needs is balance. Good mass transit, good accommodation for bikes and pedestrians, as well as room for cars. The love of cars, and their bunny-like proliferation that follows from this unnatural love, is the problem. For dense urban centres like Toronto, car sharing has the potential to be a sort of prophylactic in our 125-year-old love affair with the car, letting us have our cities, and live in them, too. 

 

For many of us, car sharing seems to have come out of nowhere. With bike sharing added to the mix, it can seem a little trendy. Are we going to look back on this past decade and see car sharing as the Discman of the aughts? Not as far as Miller is concerned.

 

"I don't think it's a fad at all," says Miller. "I think it's going to grow and I think it's going to elaborate. You're going to see evolution of the business model." Miller sees car sharing expanding into what he calls station cars, vehicles, probably electric, meant just to get people between transit stations and their home or office.

 

"The ability to own a car, park it either in front of your house and in a garage, is going to become more and more difficult," he says. "Cars are going to get more and more expensive to operate, and it'll be much more convenient to just pick up the car and pick up the groceries and come home again. I think we're just at the beginning of this."

 

Toronto Talks Mobility, a forum for the discussion of all forms of urban transportation, takes place Nov. 9 and 10 at City Hall Chambers and Artscape Wychwood Barns respectively.

 

Top photos: Christian Demers of Zipcar. Lower photos: Kevin McLaughlin of Autoshare.

Bert Archer is Yonge Street's development editor.