Hopping around the city - sustainably

Victoria Carter has just had ‘a week of rubbish’. Dismayed at the amount of trash spied while out walking her dog in the local park, she decided to spend a week picking up the detritus and recording the finds on her company’s website.

Carter is CEO of Cityhop, an entrant in the inaugural Sustainable 60 Series, but her company blog — musing on everything from vege gardens to eco-warriors — isn’t the usual bland corporate fare. It hints at a wider interest in things sustainable, and why she co-founded the country’s first car share company.

Cityhop’s raison d’être is sustainability, and is based on a growing desire from consumers to reduce their carbon footprint, as well as free themselves from the expense and hassle of car ownership.

Car sharing is a burgeoning global trend; Fortune recently reported the world’s largest car sharing company, US-based Zipcar, has 325,000 members and is growing about 30% a year. It works like a traditional rental car company, but users rent cars by the hour and vehicles are dotted around CBD car parks or at other key locations for self-service pickup.

Say you live on Waiheke Island and you’d like to use a car for an hour or two to do business in the city. Or you live in an inner-city apartment and need a car occasionally, but don’t want to shoulder the huge expense of a permanent car park on top of the usual costs of car ownership.

Chris Alpe, founder of Maui Rentals, first broached the idea for Cityhop with Carter after spying a story about car share in a Melbourne newspaper. Carter, who is involved in a couple of other businesses with Alpe, thought it looked like a great idea and began studying how the model worked overseas.

A former Auckland City councillor, she approached the council about establishing a partnership and went through a tendering process allowing the company to rent five spaces in council car parks. The company also worked with another Kiwi company, Nautech, to develop technology that allows Cityhop members keyless entry to the cars using a swipe card.

Cityhop was set up as a joint venture between Carter and the Alpe family’s car and camper rental company Jucy Rentals at the end of 2006. The first five Cityhop cars hit Auckland roads in September the following year.

The concept has since expanded into Wellington, New Plymouth and Christchurch. Membership now totals more than 300, including around 60 corporates.

The environmental benefits of car share are numerous, says Carter. Offshore research has shown car sharers reduce both their vehicle miles and CO2 emissions by around 50%.

“What that identifies is every time they go to make a journey they think ‘is the car the best way to get from this point to this point or maybe I will bike, or catch a bus, or just walk’,” says Carter. “There’s a whole shift in thinking that occurs.”

Cityhop’s 25-car fleet is made up of Daihatsu Sirions and Mitsubishi i-cars, chosen for their comparatively low CO2 emissions. All booking and invoicing is done online, in keeping with the company’s sustainability focus, says Carter.

The company has focused on selling the financial as well as environmental savings members can make by signing up to a car share service. Many people don’t give enough thought to the true cost of car ownership, not just in terms of petrol, maintenance, insurance and parking, but also depreciation, especially on a second or third car, says Carter. The same applies to companies with vast corporate fleets.

“We know our members are making a great difference by choosing not to own a car and we’re helping them to do that and save money,” she says.

The car share concept, however, is taking longer than Carter thought to catch on. The company sees itself as part of “the public transport equation”, she says, but she has been disheartened by the response from some quarters, particularly some government departments, and says some car share companies offshore have received sizeable local and state government funding.

“It doesn’t seem to matter how good the idea is, it still takes time.”