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by ignormies 1139 days ago
> Families and anyone who wants to do anything with loads larger than a suitcase would move out

That's where carshare (like Zipcar) comes into play. Carshare allows residents to be able to access a full vehicle when they need to "do anything with loads larger than a suitcase", without using public property for their own personal, subsidized, private car storage.

2 comments

Theoretically, yes, in practice, if I couldn't get a permit for my street, I'd sell the house and move out to the suburbs to somewhere where I can actually park, or get a house with a drive, rather than spending my time and money renting cars every time I want to do anything like going to a DIY store, visiting family, going camping etc.

I have a Zipcar account and it's just a big faff. Limited miles, super expensive, car is always damaged and a bit smelly, you have to hope that it's available for the times you need (almost never is if that's more than a day) it's just a mess.

It just about works for picking up large items from FB marketplace or house moves, but even for that I'm considering just buying a van to avoid the fuss.

As I mentioned - it's not like it's theoretically impossible, it just changes the make up of the city and who lives there. I'd gladly buy the parking spot outside my house if the council were willing to sell it...

Shared cars are a tragedy of the commons. People famously drive rentals terribly. When you spend even less time with the car you have correspondingly less attachment and accountability. As a consequence, the user fee includes a huge risk premium, on top of the usual system maintenance costs.

You could force a tracker on people, but the privacy implications are severe and frankly unethical.

> You could force a tracker on people, but the privacy implications are severe and frankly unethical.

On a Zipcar? They're already GPS tracked everywhere. They're not your car. I don't think a device that monitors hard accel/breaking activity would be outrageous in this scenario.