What if Boston city workers used Zipcar?

When the budget cannot be increased an expected percentage, instead increasing a smaller percentage, it is a 'crisis' and the lack of increase a 'shortfall'.

When the budget is restrained from increasing to an expected percentage, instead increasing a smaller percentage, it is a 'budget cut' and 'fiscal conservatism'.

Thus far, we have no idea what to call an actual budget decrease, but I'm sure we'll come up with something snappy should it happen.

Suldog
http://jimsuldog.blogspot.com

are you at risk of losing a free car?

The press release says exactly this:

"The Administration piloted the program last Oct. in an effort to fulfill the Administration’s goal of eliminating 150 vehicles from the city’s motor fleet. To date, the District has trimmed approximately 360 vehicles from the fleet, yielding an estimated savings of $6.6 million over five years."

"Trimmed," as used in contemporary American English, is commonly interpreted as "reduced" or "removed" as in "he's really /trimmed/ down" (weight loss) or "overhead has been /trimmed/ at the country club due to the loss of members this year"

The press release says the goal was to eliminate 150 vehicles, and that 360 have been "trimmed" (it would be awkward form for the writer to repeat the word "eliminated" so close to its first use), and that there is a concrete estimate of savings of about $1.3 million per year. That works out to about $3,600 per year, for each of 360 cars. Those number seem well within the bounds of reality.

It is true though that they've removed 360 cars from their fleet and are now using 58 shared cars to cover for the same amount of usage the 360 cars previously provided.

It's hard to say how much of a dent in the original fleet that is. Part of the problem is that "the fleet" includes *everything*. For example, a van used to transport prisoners from building to building on prison grounds only is included int "the fleet". You can't replace that with car sharing and yet it counts against you in terms of "what percentage of cars less is 360 from before?". You can actually read about it in this article on Government-Fleet.com (I kid you not, there is a trade publication on this *very* topic). In that article, it mentions that the removed vehicles will cover 17% of their passenger vehicle inventory. That doesn't distinguish "unremovable" passenger vehicles from those that they could potentially remove. It's also not clear how much that number might jump up next year once departmental/divisional managers realize they should get with the program (they were given an opportunity to opt-out with cause and a few were predictably reticent to the change). But, personally, I'd consider more than 1 out of every 6 passenger vehicle removed from their fleet to be a very significant chunk for such a novel program.

I hope Boston adopts this change as well. One word of caution, however, is to do it like DC and force managers to submit the results of a decision tree for predicting how many car-hours/car-miles they actually use per year and then specifically justify any exceptions to the removal of vehicles that they deem necessary. There's an equally bad example to DC's good example right next door to DC in Montgomery County, MD where officials signed up with Enterprise Rent-A-Car to the tune of over $100,000 for less than 4 months so far...and used it only 84 hours. Here, they are pre-paying for access to the cars AND they made it OPTIONAL for county employees to turn in their personal cars and use the car-sharing program. This is just about the worst way to implement such an idea and should serve as a warning to others, like Boston, as to how NOT to do it.

Being so progressive and all that, Boston saw Zipcar coming over the horizon and said "Yes! We can tax it!"
... and they did

The suggestion was to tax every zipcar rental. A lot. Like "rented a beater from Avis at BOS and paid $20 in convention center fees and other taxes" a lot.

ONLY through prolonged lobbying by Zipcar, even involving members and would-be members in Boston, did the company even get into a place where it was sorely needed, despite (or maybe because of) its HQ being a few feet away across a not very wide river... a place the feds have intervened in, to try to cut down on cars. There's something like 3 cars with permits for every 2 parking spaces, I read once.

So how did that work out? "Compromise," Menino style.

it was decided that Zipcar members would pay $10 in a special Zipcar tax the first time they rent a car in Boston in any one-year period.

Zipcar then had to modify is software just for the extra special city of Boston, to keep track of all this... not merely calendar years, but member-years... has the member rented a car in the city of boston within the past year? If no, collect ten American dollars and send them to Tom's office.

Good old anti-free-market Menino... he decides who plays, not the market place. He stepped up to protect his pals at Hertz and Avis from the demon car sharing company that actually had (and has) the product people want, and that the city desperately needed to help cut the number of cars in town.