City Hall’s Cars by Day, and Yours by Night

Many New Yorkers have given up their cars to embrace the perks of the Zipcar lifestyle — the on-demand service of a personal vehicle without those pesky fuel, insurance and parking costs.

Now City Hall, no big fan of the automobile, is following suit.

Early next year, employees at the Department of Transportation plan to start using a third-party car-sharing service, similar to Zipcar, to book rides around town. Instead of hopping into an in-house Prius or Taurus, reserved for a single employee, workers will share a smaller pool of vehicles that can be more efficiently used.

The pilot project, modeled after programs in Philadelphia and Washington, will replace 57 cars in the department’s city-owned fleet with 25 vehicles from the car-sharing service, set aside for city use during business hours. On nights and weekends, instead of languishing in garages (or taking up space on the street), the cars will be available for use by the public.

While the prospect of driving the same car as a high-ranking public servant may scintillate some, officials said their priority was to lower costs and shrink the city’s Sasquatch-size carbon footprint. “We’re doing everything we can to lessen the impact on the environment,” Janette Sadik-Khan, the transportation commissioner, said in an interview this week. She said she hoped that allowing the public to use the cars during off hours would reduce congestion and maximize their use.

Officials would not provide a cost-savings estimate, saying they needed to wait to see bids from car-sharing vendors. (A formal request is to be issued on Friday, with bids due in early November.)

But other cities that have begun car-sharing have seen considerable savings by ridding their fleets of underused vehicles. Since 2005, Philadelphia has saved more than $600,000 in maintenance costs — including parking, repairs and fuel — by taking 140 vehicles out of its fleet, said Robert Fox, director of Philadelphia’s municipal car fleet.

Philadelphia also earned thousands of dollars more by auctioning off unwanted cars to the public, a plan that New York plans to follow with some of the older cars now in its fleet.

The city estimates that its vehicles would have a resale value of about $2,000 each. In Washington, where the program began last year, about 360 city-owned cars were replaced by 71 shared vehicles — an 80 percent drop. “It’s actually more cost-effective for me to rent the vehicle by the hour as opposed to owning it and having it on my books,” said Ralph Burns, the vehicle control officer at the District of Columbia Department of Public Works.

Still, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg won’t be giving up his king-size S.U.V. just yet. New York’s pilot program will last at least a year before officials decide whether to expand the service to other city agencies.

“If this works like we expect it to, it will provide the data needed to assess blowing this up on a large scale citywide,” Ms. Sadik-Khan said.

Zipcar, perhaps the most popular of the car-sharing companies, offers customers choices like a Mini Cooper convertible or Ford Mustang. Does this mean city employees will be jetting around town in high style?

“We’re not interested in the sporty vehicles,” Seth Solomonow, a spokesman for the Transportation Department, said. “We’re interested in vehicles that get the job done.” He added that hybrids and S.U.V.’s would be the likely choice.

Although putting car-sharing into effect can create logistical problems — it often involves an entirely new software infrastructure and training for employees — officials in other cities said the biggest barrier was psychological. Many public servants, they said, are loath to relinquish a cherished perk that offers a quick way to get around on official business.

“We felt we were changing a culture, and that culture was that people had cars handed down to them,” said Mr. Fox, in Philadelphia. “Whether they had outlived the usefulness of a car, it didn’t matter. How that plays itself out, over time, is you’re buying vehicles that you don’t need.”

Mr. Burns, in Washington, said employees were initially skeptical about picking up a car that might not be stored in the garage directly beneath their building. But they soon adjusted to a short subway ride to the nearest carport.

Union officials who represent New York City employees said the plan would probably affect only nonunion managers.

Currently, many of the Transportation Department’s vehicles are stored in a garage under the Brooklyn Bridge, a 10-minute walk from the agency’s offices. Others take up parking space around City Hall Park.

“You certainly don’t need a study to know that spaces are at a premium in Lower Manhattan,” Ms. Sadik-Khan said.


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