[mikeash]

This got me thinking: why are short-term rental services so expensive? Surely the driver makes up a large chunk of the cost of a service like Uber, so renting the car alone should be much cheaper.

My guess is that rental services need a considerable oversupply of vehicles to make up for the uneven nature of demand. If I'm going to use such a service, I need to be reasonably certain that I can get a car within walking distance, and that means they need enough cars within a fairly small area to handle the 95th percentile of demand (or whatever percentile is appropriate).

With something like Uber, the supply is effectively shared within the metro area, so sudden demand in one small area doesn't hurt. If the nearest Uber car is a five-minute drive away, that's fine. If the nearest ZipCar vehicle is a five-minute drive away, you are probably not using ZipCar today.

I think this brings us back to the continuing discussion of self-driving cars....

[andrewmunsell]

I find that to be completely true-- the area around my office is completely void of Car2Go cars from around 4 PM later. I had to walk ~1/5 of a mile to get to the nearest one. Of course, I'm sure at 1 AM that you'd be able to find a parked car pretty close to you, provided you're not by a bunch of offices which have had the cars driven away to residential areas by people at their jobs.

[qeorge]

I had to walk ~1/5 of a mile to get to the nearest one.

Which is what, a 4 minute walk? That seems pretty minimal to me.

[ZoF]

I'm honestly wondering if that's a typo.

In what way is ~1250 feet considered a far distance to go for a rental car? Even in a populous metro area that seems about as short a walk as I would expect, are they generally closer?

[andrewmunsell]

It's not a typo, but it is 90 degrees today, and I'm sure many people would prefer to be able to be either picked up or go around a corner to find a car.

[electrum]

Put another way, that is two city blocks, which is a very reasonable distance to walk after finding parking in any major city.

[chatmasta]

ZipCar is $7-10 per hour on the low end of prices. Compared to Uber, that's extremely cheap.

[andrewmunsell]

That is if you're planning on being the car for an hour, and depending on the service, whether you're starting and ending near a parking spot. As in my example, if you're going to a hardware store and need a full sized car, ZipCar would be much better than Uber or even Car2Go because it's so cheap per hour.

[mikeash]

ZipCar requires you to drop the car where you picked it up, right? So that $7-10/hour includes the time you spend on whatever non-driving activity you get up to at the destination.

[thaumasiotes]

Yes, as of 2012 when I could have used such a service. $10 / hour is a fine price for short-term car rental... but since I wanted to use the car to go places, as opposed to just driving around in the parking lot, it worked out to more like $50-100 per hour (of driving).

Bicycle rentals don't work like that -- you get on a bike at one stand and leave it at the stand closest to where you want to end up. I don't know why the car model is so badly broken.

[zyxley]

Take a look at Car2Go, which has nominal rates a little higher than Zipcar, but pricing that scales down to minutes and is based around a "leave the car wherever" model.

[superuser2]

Bicycles cost ~50x less but can be rented at similar rates. Also it's relatively easy for a bike-sharing company to redistribute bicycles on a truck if the supply bunches up somewhere.

An hour of Divvy is surprisingly close in cost to an hour of ZipCar, which is astonishing considering how much more it must cost to operate ZipCar.

[akgerber]

Bikesharing is designed to encourage short trips within its service zone— even if you want a longer trip, you can just dock/undock a bike to avoid a fee (aka docksurfing). The escalating hourly fee is designed to keep the bikes in circulation, not as a charge you pay during ordinary usage— I've been a member of Citibike in NYC for over a year, and have never paid a fee beyond the membership.

With Zipcar, you first pay a membership nearly as expensive as bikesharing, then pay at least $10/hr.