This Woman Is Redefining Public Transportation

Ask a friend to name a shared transportation option and he’ll probably mention that bus that rumbles past on the avenue or the commuter train that all the office jockeys pile into each weekday morning. But Robin Chase thinks the phrase is about to undergo a radical evolution. Almost ten years ago she founded car-sharing service Zip Car, which has proven a smashing success in urban areas across the country and is rumored to be going public next year. Now she’s put her visionary zeal behind GoLoco, a social networking site that encourage people to catch rides with each other (they take a 10 percent a fee if you choose to let them manage the financial arrangements.)

Thinking of your friends’ and neighbors’ cars as a personal transportation resource is the next wave in American mobility, Chase argues — an elegant response to rising costs, congestion and our existing road-heavy infrastructure.

Cassim Shepard of Urban Omnibus and I spoke with Chase recently, and she made the case.

You coined one of my favorite phrases: “Infrastructure is destiny.” I want to use that as a motto for Infrastructurist.
RC:  It feels like such a truism to me now. Our infrastructure either makes a given activity either easy or difficult.  And we all like to do things easily. So whatever infrastructure enables us to do conveniently, that’s what we do more of and the things that it makes difficult, we do less of them. Today we have set up our infrastructure to make getting in your car and going door to door really easy. Getting there by bike or by foot is frequently terrifying and dangerous. So which way do we go? You know, our infrastructure is our destiny.

We’re all familiar with those situations where walking is essentially impossible–even to places that should be walkable.
Recently, I went to Detroit to talk to some car companies and I was staying at a motel next to a highway. Right across the street was a mall. One morning I wanted to buy an apple and a newspaper. But to get across the street you had to go onto the highway up half a mile and do a U-turn, come  back, go across.  And then when I was in that mall, the place that sold the newspaper didn’t sell apples. I had to get back in my car to drive to the other side of the mall to get an apple.

Give us ride sharing 101 — how can your new venture GoLoco change how we get around by using our existing infrastructure?
The big idea for ride sharing and for GoLoco is to think of your car, your expenses, your friends, and your trips as part of your own personal public transportation system. It builds on the idea of long tail media and long tail economics. Ride sharing is the long tail of public transportation. It extends the system to little niches of demand way out there in places where you’ll never see bus service. I think ride-sharing will become a standard way of getting around. We’ve just barely started.

It certainly feels like the right idea at the right time.

I think we will look back at how we travel today–sitting alone in 120 square feet of car– and just be astounded: astounded at the cost, astounded at the waste. It’s such a wacky idea that we’d want to be alone in our cars spending huge sums of money. This is why I founded GoLoco. We know that we can’t build our way out of congestion, so if things are increasingly, year after year, getting more congested, there’s only one solution for that, which is addressing the cost of driving at peak periods.

So this revolution is going to be driven by personal economic necessity?

At $2 per gallon, people spend 18 percent of their income on their car, and that’s without paying for congestion pricing or gas tax increases or any other changes to transportation financing that are probably coming. Where the price of gas is concerned we have increasing demand from India and China, and arguably peak oil. Ride sharing is going to become significant as we transform our infrastructure to become less car-dependent. I don’t see another solution. Nearly 90 percent of trips made are alone in a car. Then think about standing in a mall, looking at a parking lot. You know that lots of people there are going exactly where you’re going in the next five minutes.

You grew up in the developing world, in the Middle East. What insights did that give you on transportation?
In developing countries there’s this whole sweep of options that together are known as the informal transportation sector. It’s very common to be sticking your hand out and hitch a ride–people pick people up all the time. That’s a crummy ride, 9 people to a small truck. But there’s a big range: There’s the basic bus, and there’s the air-conditioned bus, and so on up the scale. All together, there’s a big range.

But at some point that range of choices gets flattened.
What happens is that it becomes very chaotic and scary and unregulated and there’s a perceived lack of safety. In developed countries we cut out all of that informal sector to overcome those issues. So we have just one way of getting around–owning your own car–with a little tiny bit of public transit thrown in. You either own a car or you can’t get to your job and you starve. So the pendulum here has gone too far in the other direction. We have no options.

What do you think about taxis?
Taxis are great in that if we look at the percentage of time that they’re in motion with someone going someplace, they aren’t taking up parking spaces. But if we think of empty taxis that are driving around in circles, that’s not so good. So I guess you have to look at the balance–you know, whats your cruising-to-fare ratio?

New York suddenly became a model for taxi sharing when transit workers went on strike in 2005 and taxi drivers went on strike in 2007.
Yes, within hours New Yorkers were willing to do many people in a car. It’s in us to do that, but it took a push.

Why don’t we do it more often?
One reason is that it seems culturally weird. At JFK airport, for some reason it’s socially unacceptable to just ask someone, “Where are you going? Do you want to share a cab?” And then when you’re not bunched together at a taxi stand, the problem is lack of visibility.  If on taxis there was a sign that announced it was en route to LaGuardia or 42nd Street or whatever, then it would be easy for me to realize ‘Oh, I can stick my hand out and catch this cab.’

It’s remarkable to think about how much strain there was on many American families–particularly those in far-flung suburbs–when gas was over $4 a gallon last year. Do you think we really understand the magnitude of the adjustments we face in this country if energy prices ever go above that?
I think the public definitely does not grasp that.  I have this lovely line that one of the founders of the internet told me the other day.  He said, “When we started this 40 years ago, we had no idea that this is where we’d end up.” I feel like that is such a profound and beautiful statement of how every single time we build something. We should be asking ourselves: “Are we building something that allows our use of it to evolve over time?”

Does a less daunting example of this principle come to mind?
I was in Holland a couple of years ago and I was looking at the old, merchant row houses. The merchants who lived there initially had their shops on the ground floor with their families living above.  With maybe three or four floors, each family could also have renters or storage space or a larger family. Those houses were so versatile.  Some of the industrial warehouses we built in this country are like that. But then you compare them to the giant high-rises that are made for offices–once you stop doing AT&T call centers there, there isn’t another blessed thing that you’d want to do in that space. It’s this particular thing that you’re doing there or that’s it.

What’s the lesson here for infrastructure investment?
Looking at roads, my guess would be in 100 years its not gonna be 4 lanes of single occupancy vehicles. I don’t like to place really long bets. I guess the most successful solution is to produce things that can be highly adaptable–so we might we want to run a transit line down the middle or create a dedicated bus lane or have bicycle lanes. And that relates to “infrastructure is destiny.” Infrastructure is not usually created to be adaptable–and that’s why it often plays out in bad ways. “Flexible infrastructure”… maybe that’s the new catch phrase.

We’ll run more of this interview later in the week. Urban Omnibus also ran a longer version of the exchange that’s very much worth reading.