On a bitingly cold and rainy November evening last year, I was in a pickle: I’d taken a city bus to CoCo, the coworking space where I office in downtown Minneapolis, and was seemingly stuck without an efficient option for getting to Birchwood Café, where I would meet friends for dinner, three miles away. That is until I remembered my new membership with car2go, a car-share service that had recently won a contract with the city of Minneapolis. I quickly located a vehicle using car2go’s mobile app and, my despair vanishing, dashed out of the building in search of the blue and white smart car parked only a few blocks away.
car2go’s operating program—“take it, drive it, park it”—allows users to drive vehicles and leave them on the street anywhere within the designated home area. What I love about it, beyond the fact that it’s incredibly cost effective compared to owning a car, is that the community of drivers stewards the system. Users are encouraged to keep the cars’ gas tanks full and tidy their tiny interiors before ending a trip. What’s more, the drivers I know agree that it actually feels good to leave a car in a new location because, in doing so, you increase access to the shared resource.
– See more at: http://onthecommons.org/magazine/deep-sharing#sthash.32Un5UMf.dpuf
