TRANSPORTATION: CAR-SHARING PROJECT TAKES TO THE ROAD This year 60 Bay Area residents are leaving their personal cars in the garage and instead sharing the use of 12 Hondas in the largest, most technically sophisticated test of car sharing in the United States. Called CarLink: A Smart Car-Sharing System, the program is a research project of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis. CarLink project partners in government and private industry include the Bay Area Rapid Transit District, American Honda Motor Co., Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the California Department of Transportation. The goal of CarLink is to learn whether people in this region can make car sharing work for commuting and running errands. The 12 cars will be located at the Dublin/Pleasanton BART station and at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, when they are not at an individual's home. Participants will pay a monthly or hourly fee depending on how the car is used, and the most advanced technology available will be used to manage vehicle reservations and billing. The cars--four-door, ultra-low-emission sedans powered by compressed natural gas--will be refueled at the Livermore lab. Honda Motor Co., which is helping underwrite the program and providing the cars, will pay for all vehicle operating costs, including maintenance and insurance coverage. "Our personal cars sit unused in parking lots and garages an average of 23 hours per day. When we do use them, they usually carry only one person," said CarLink project manager and lead researcher Susan Shaheen, a doctoral candidate at UC Davis (shown above). "With car sharing, the individual still has a car to use whenever it's needed. But when it's not being used, someone else can use it. Car sharing could have many benefits--for the owner, who saves money on car payments, insurance and maintenance; for the community, which needs less highway construction and traffic management; for businesses, which need smaller parking lots; and for the environment, which suffers less water and air pollution," Shaheen continued. "It's such a simple concept, you wonder why people haven't done more of this." In Europe, people have. The first car-sharing organization was founded in Switzerland in 1948. Today there are more than 200 such organizations from Scotland to Austria, with more than 100,000 members. The United States and Canada have just nine car-sharing organizations (excluding CarLink). Shaheen traveled extensively throughout Europe and North America in 1997 and 1998, studying the details of existing car-sharing programs. Then, with input from the CarLink partners, she designed the year-long research program. "The one-person, one-car approach to transportation is not sustainable," said UC Davis professor Daniel Sperling, an internationally recognized expert on sustainable transportation and director of the Institute of Transportation Studies. "Smart car sharing is an innovative step in the right direction--toward transportation that is more economical, equitable and environmental."