ride joe ride

So we’ve been living without a car for a couple of months now. In general, we would all probably say we’re much happier without one. The lack of parking frustration, all the money spent on the car, and the utter convenience of living life by bike totally outweigh the occasional inconvenience car-less living occasionally entails. Recently, though, we have hit a couple of problems which stretch inconvenience toward downright annoying.

The other night, I needed to pick up Allison at the airport. Her flight was supposed to come in at 11 but landed a half hour later than that. The first problem was the lack of a close-by zipcar. The nearest non-reserved one was more than a mile away, not in the best area to walk at 10 pm, and the public trans options for getting to it were non-optimal. Unlike grocery getting trips which can be rescheduled, though, I had no choice so I reserved it. This entailed a mile walk to it and after the pickup (at about 12:30am as it turns out). The half hour delay on the flight meant that I had to extend the reservation while in route (twice in fact). If someone had made a reservation immediately after my intended return time after I had left, I would have been in a serious pickle. It also meant that the trip cost twice what just going to the airport should have. Having our own car would have solved all these problems.

This weekend, we’d like to take a trip out of town Sunday. Zipcar is out, as our intended route is a round trip of 300 miles (zip gives you 180 miles for a day rental). Our local Enterprise car rental closes at noon on Saturday and reopens on Monday morning, which means we’d be renting for 2.5 days. This would make our few hour drive on Sunday run about $200 with gas, and we’d have to park the car for two nights. I haven’t looked today but I’ll bet I could get a flight to San Francisco for less than that. This is definitely more than an inconvenience. Last summer, I really enjoyed getting out of the city for the weekend in sort of an unplanned way. Now I am realizing that doing this is going to cost a less than trivial amount of money, which means it probably won’t happen. We basically had a summer getaway plan before, and we no longer do.

I could go on about how this is likely to due the economy or search for the deeper implications thats this has for the extent of one’s living environment, but right now I don’t feel like doing much more than dwelling on the fact that sometimes being car-less is a royal pain in the arse.

When we sold our car a month ago, one of the prime facilitators of that decision was knowing that we are lucky enough to have two car sharing options close to our home: Igo and Zipcar. This weekend we tried Igo for the first time (we’ve used Zipcar a few times already). For a variety of reasons, we really want to make Igo our default service: they’re locally conceived and based, they’re a non-profit organization etc. This weekend’s experience left us wondering if we’d use Igo again, however. Here’s why:

1. After a couple of unplanned stops we realized we were not going to make it back on time. No problem, we thought, we’ll just extend our time. Since Igo’s site isn’t at all iphone friendly, Allison called the number on the dashboard (which included the wrong number option to select). We were asked to enter our member number. No sweat, I had my member card handy and that’s where the member number was right? Wrong. The number printed on the back of the card isn’t the member number. In fact, the actual number does not appear on the card. When Allison tried to get past the automated phone system, she was re-routed three times to again enter the number. Yeah, the one we didn’t have. Finally, we abandoned our last stop not knowing if we were going to make it back on time.

This is just horrible user interface. If the member number is essential for doing something like extending the reservation, it should be printed on something which you certain to have in the car while using it. End of story.

2. When we finally talked to a person after problem #1, we overreacted and got too much extra time. We decided to be good Igo citizens and fill up the gas tank (which earns some credit toward the usage fee.) This turned into a 20 minute fiasco. The filling directions were unclear and inaccurate seeming to be left over from a previous fueling procedure. Going into detail would put you to sleep. This needs to be fixed.

3. After dropping off our groceries (and Igo card it turns out), we headed back to park the car. Unlike Zipcar, Igo’s key/card procedure has you do all “intra-trip” locking and unlock via the actual car keys — you use the card only to activate and deactivate the car at either ends of your use. This also means that the penultimate step in using the car involves locking the car manually with the keys inside it. This isn’t a problem because then you just deactivate the car with your card once the doors are locked. Unless you left the card somewhere. Or locked it in the car in your purse. Then you’d be standing by the car, your purse locked inside with your phone (which you might have used to call Igo) and card (which you might have used to get back into the car) sitting there in the back seat. Yeah. We were lucky in having just left our card at home with the groceries, but the potential for a real problem is right there. There is a better way of doing this. Zipcar has it.