The car-sharing concept has arrived in Springfield.
A Boston-based car-sharing company owned by Avis Budget Group Inc. (Nasdaq: CAR) has partnered with Missouri State University student government and management officials to serve MSU students and the broader community.
Zipcar Inc. (Nasdaq: ZIP) launched its membership-based car rental and sharing service Aug. 29 at MSU with two Ford Focus vehicles on the Springfield campus. The move comes two months after young businessmen Cody Stringer and Jason Graf organized Springfield Bike Share, which is designed to serve MSU students and center city bikers.
Maxwell Wagner, chief sustainability commissioner for MSU’s Student Government Association, said he helped to establish a cooperative agreement between Zipcar and MSU because he believes in the car-sharing concept as a viable transportation alternative.
“I was looking for really interesting sustainability projects that I could bring to Missouri State,” Wagner said. “I was online and a found a news report that talked about the Zipcar car-sharing concept at a university in Maine. I thought it was a really interesting idea, so I looked up Zipcar and learned about how it operates.”
Locally, $25 first-year memberships are available to students at least 18 years old and to residents ages 21 and up. Members can rent the vehicles for $7.50 an hour or $69 per day, with gas, insurance and maintenance included in the rental agreement. Through a Web-based scheduling platform, Zipcar members can reserve vehicles in locations across the nation and access cars with their Zipcards, which serve as wireless keys.
The reservations platform, accessible on mobile apps, establishes the date and time of pick-up and drop-off.
The cars will be maintained by local vendors, Wagner said, noting Zipcar doesn’t have employees working out of MSU or Springfield because the vehicles are equipped with technology to alert officials in Boston of maintenance needs. MSU is providing Zipcar with free parking spaces and helping to market the new service, but Wagner said the school isn’t shelling out cash for the cars.
According to Zipcar.com, the company operates a fleet of 10,000 cars in 27 major metropolitan areas and on 350 college campuses. Zipcar has 850,000 members.
Katelyn Lopresti, who serves as general manager over the company’s university operations, said students and administrators are attracted to the Zipcar model because it can help reduce parking congestion on campuses. And convenience is a big key.
“Students, faculty, staff and community members can have access to the vehicles 24/7. Without having to wait in line, they can be reserved minutes in advance,” Lopresti said, adding the all-inclusive nature of the system reduces headaches for members.
As car sharing takes root at MSU, a pair of local entrepreneurs are looking to bring bike sharing to town.
Stringer said he and Graf are working to make Springfield Bike Share a nonprofit organization before they start raising the estimated $500,000 in expected startup expenses.
“Our expectation is that this would be a community program centered around the downtown area and central core of town,” Stringer said.
He said the young company has had informal talks with city officials and, recently, with Wagner at MSU to gauge interest in a program.
“We know that college students make up a large proportion of bike-share users in other communities, and we felt like the viability of the program would be very much helped by having Missouri State on board,” Stringer said, adding he talked with Wagner for the first time just a couple of days before the Zipcar launch.
Stringer and Graf have yet to set a pricing structure, but they are tentatively talking about rolling out with 15 bike racks across center city with membership options for daily, weekly and annual usage.
“I just came back from a trip to Madison, Wis., which has one of the most prolific bike-share systems in the country,” Stringer said, noting he paid $5 for a 24-hour membership. “I spent about five hours riding bikes, with breaks in between to eat dinner and walk around the capitol – things like that. The system was dense, so I was able to find a rack within a block or two of wherever my destination was.”
As for the car-sharing model, not everyone sees it as a detour from traditional car rentals.
Laura Bryant, a spokeswoman for Clayton-based Enterprise Holdings Inc., which is the parent company for Enterprise Rent-A-Car, National Car Rental and Alamo Rent a Car, said car sharing is nothing more than an extension of the car rental market – and Enterprise is a veteran in the game.
Through Enterprise CarShare, the company operates in nearly 20 major markets including New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago, and its service is available on over 80 university campuses and 40 government and business campuses. Enterprise Rent-A-Car launched hourly rentals in 2005 and local car-sharing services – before the name caught on – in 2007.
“It’s been a gradual and intuitive evolution,” Bryant said, adding car sharing for Enterprise began as a way to meet corporate customer needs. “You’ve already got the fleet. You’re already where people live and work. All you have to do is add a little technology and instead of doing it by the day, you can do it by the hour.”
She declined to say whether Enterprise felt threatened by the addition of Zipcar into the Springfield market, citing a policy not to discuss competition.
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