A Little Bit of Zipcar Controversy in Vancouver

[Tara Hunt]

From a comment on my Getting Greener post.

"An interesting note about Zipcar: they just launched in Vancouver (like, yesterday), and from what I can garner from my peers, they’re facing a lot of negative reaction.

Why? Because Vancouver has a venerable, much-loved car co-op (http://www.cooperativeauto.net/) and Zipcar is the first (and only, I believe) direct competitor in the city. Everybody has good, positive feelings about the co-op, so they’re not digging the American corporate competition."

This is actually an interesting conversation...is competition bad? Personally, when I say that I heart Zipcar, I really heart the idea of community car sharing, which includes the 'competition' like City Carshare, Flexcar and all of the awesome local cooperative auto companies. It's important to have choice, and, I believe, as the movement towards sharing cars grows, we'll need choice more and more.

In fact, we're planning on applying to City Carshare in addition to Zipcar...as we are finding that there are times we need to have more choice already!
What are your thoughts on this?

[Alex Hillman]

Flexcar just announced that they are coming to Philadelphia. I'm not nervous for Philly Car Share, though they are privately run and non-profit, they have done an INCREDIBLE job of building a community around their service. They've built a sustainable group, and hopefully, the new competition will just drive them to provide an even better service than before.