Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Living with Car2Go

Let's say you have a net zero energy home.  That's great.

But if you are still driving 20,000 miles a year, you are using way more energy than a carless person living in an old, energy-hog house.  So in order to live truly sustainably, you have to think outside of your box.

Cities are very energy efficient places to live, mainly because you can walk, ride a bike, or drive a very short distance for most things in your life.  Two of the most annoying things about living in a city are traffic, and finding a parking spot at your destination.  Therefore, city living becomes more enjoyable if you can live without a car.  As cities become more dense, cities must find ways to help their residents wean off of cars.

Real estate in cities is just too valuable to use for storing cars and for providing wide streets.  Since we only use our cars for 1-5% of the day, why are we paying to insure and store them the rest of the time?  Car2Go isn't a perfect solution yet, but it's an extremely convenient and successful way to help us share our cars and reduce the number of cars we need to store in the city.

Claire Martin of the Denver Post wrote a great article that describes the reality of using Car2Go, RTD and BikeShare rather than owning a car.

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