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Comment by mantas | Hacker News Reader

So if you want a car for hobbies (e.g. getting to backcountry) or transporting your kids around, you shouldn't live in an urban area?

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When I was living in Montreal for a couple of years I signed up to a community car share scheme. No insurance, no maintenance, no road taxes so it worked out cheaper to "rent a car" just when I needed it: https://www.communauto.com/index_en.html

With a good, cheap, reliable public transport system with this as backup I could easily get rid of my car if I lived in an urban area but still needed to get around at the weekends.

That's what I don't get about 'car sharing'. Everybody wants the car on the weekend. If the service has to have enough cars for everybody, what's the difference between that and leasing/owning? It doesn't save on cars that's for sure.

Do you really want a car every day of most weekends? What for?

(I suspect the "good, cheap, reliable public transport" thing the parent mentioned is important)

In my experience of using the service, and Montreal is a much smaller city than London (where I am from), you don't want a car every weekend. I was usually able to find a car for hire as long as I booked in advance (esp for Bank Holiday type weekends) but sometimes it meant going to a different location than the one right next to me. As the system get's more popular and more people use it then they are able to purchase more cars.

> It doesn't save on cars that's for sure

I disagree. Several of my friends also used the service, just between us that saved having several cars. If you need a car all weekend, every weekend then the service is probably not for you. But if, like me, you needed it every so often then it saved a lot of money over the course of a year.

I doubt that everybody needs a car on the weekend: People that want the car to go to work are actually less likely to need a car on the weekend. However, even if we concede the point that everybody want a car on the weekend, there's still the question of whether everybody needs a car on the weekend at exactly the same time. Given that most parking spots on my street are still full at any given time during the weekend, I doubt that.

Hah yes. In the early days of Zipcar in NYC (not sure if this is still allowed as I moved to the country and now drive a gas guzzling truck), I reserved every weekend for 48 hours for a full year in advance. Then on the Friday before the reservation started I would decide what I really needed, as there was no cancellation penalty. I probably only used it every second or third weekend, but noticed it really improved my "get out there and do something" motivation, as I set the default for "I have a car."

Probably wasn't good for Zipcar though.

We have a system like this in my hometown, Bergen. I live 50 meters away from two parking garages containing four share cars each. I can reserve any of these at any time via a web app, given that no one have reserved them already.

Payment is $10 per usage plus a surcharge per kilometer driven. Key management is handled either with an electronic card key which checks the current reservation status, or key drop boxes to which all members have access. It's both cheaper and more convenient than owning a car, since I only use a car once per week on average.

There's no reason you can't have a car in an urban area, but we should work towards a transport model that doesn't require you to own one. Public transport in combination with cycling for short distances plus a solid carsharing infrastructure should be sufficient for a large chunk of the population. Even removing 30% of the cars from the streets would go a long way to improve the situation.

If you want a car for hobbies, you should figure out where to store it when you're not using it. Maybe rent a spot in an underground car park somewhere in the city. Public transport is just fine for transporting your kids around, and will be much better when there're less cars on the city roads.

If you only use it a couple of times a month, it would be cheaper to rent one than to own one.

If you are over 26 then maybe....at least in the UK if you are younger than 26 you have to pay a MASSIVE young driver surcharge(a car can cost 30 pounds/day to rent, but a young driver surcharge can be 100 pounds/day). It's literally cheaper to lease, a brand new Citroen C1 will cost you 100 pounds/month + ~80/month in insurance. The car is new so whatever goes wrong with it you are covered, you just have to put petrol in it.

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