Insider Blog: How to Share Your Car with a Stranger

How to Share Your Car with a Stranger Collaborative Consumption in Action: RelayRides

For decades, owning a car has been a status symbol, and its possession and use a private thing. Traditional car rentals cater to those who need a car temporarily, but the real problem is that the average car sits idle for 23 hours per day. While services like Zipcar offer a solution in high density areas, they require a critical mass to be successful. With peer-to-peer car-sharing, RelayRides offers an efficient way for people to get more use out of their vehicles, while providing a convenient solution for those who don’t want to or can’t own their own cars.

Name: Christina Lively, car owner. Brett Kalikow, car borrower
Age: Christina is in her 30’s, Brett is 23
Lives: Both live Cambridge, MA.
Does: Christina is a Research Associate at the Harvard School of Public Health, and musician with Chris & Meredith Thompson.
Brett is the President of Homerun Hopefuls, an organization he founded in 2002

Relay Rides from IriScape Productions on Vimeo.

The story: Growing up in the city of Providence, Christina Lively’s parents always set an example for city living by encouraging their children to use public transit, instead of using a car. “I live in the city and try to walk/run/bike or take the ‘T’ as much as possible. I will challenge myself to take public transit to new places,” says Christina. As a part-time musician, she owns a car so she can transport her equipment to and from gigs, but for the rest of the time the car sits idle. When she heard about RelayRides, an online peer-to-peer car-sharing platform based in Cambridge, she was excited by the thought of offering her rarely-used car to someone in the community who needed an occasional ride. “By sharing cars, we can reduce the number of cars in the city, while allowing people who need a car occasionally to rent one for a short time.”

On a trip to a local farmer’s market, Brett Kalikow saw an advertisement for RelayRides. He immediately saw it as an opportunity to have access to a car when he needed it, without needing to cover the expenses of owning and maintaining one himself. “I was about to sign up for a similar service with Zipcar so I thought I’d give it a shot.” With a preference for Subaru Foresters, Brett now rents a car through RelayRides about twice a month, giving him the opportunity to run errands that require convenient transport.

While it may take a change in thinking to feel comfortable borrowing an unknown neighbour’s car, Brett found the concept an easy one to grasp. “I figured it was similar to renting a car from a company. If the owners of the car were comfortable lending out their car, why shouldn’t I feel comfortable driving it?”

Interestingly, in the same way one might clean the spare room for impending guests, Christina admits, “I’ve always been vigilant about keeping the maintenance current on the car, but now I’m also thinking more about aesthetics as well. I will admit I now keep my car much cleaner than I used to! I want it to look good for those who rent it.”

The motivation: “Rather than think of people who rent my car through RelayRides as strangers, I think of them as people in my community,” reflects Christina. She rents out her car primarily for philosophical and environmental reasons, though the financial benefits are a big bonus. “People need to change their habits. If more people used public transit or walked for short trips and shared cars for longer trips, we might both increase use of public transit and decrease … the number of cars in the city.”

From Brett’s perspective, RelayRides is “helping cash strapped car owners maintain their cars and helping those who don’t need cars full time get transportation at minimal cost to the environment.” But underlying this basic equation, he recognizes something deeper; peer-to-peer car-sharing actually facilitates trusting relationships between neighbours. Christina agrees that the increased sense of community created by the likes of RelayRides is fundamental, and perhaps the key to shifting attitudes towards other means of Collaborative Consumption. Apart from RelayRides, organizations such as Zilok, Rentalic and NeighborGoods are helping to turn our ‘idle’ possessions into something that’s useful to someone else, as well as personalizing the experience of borrowing or renting things by tapping into the neighbourhood network.

A shared future?: It seems fitting that one of Brett’s favorite RelayRides moments so far was when he borrowed a car to go and pick up an ottoman he had sourced through his local Freecycle network. In Christina’s case, she has started exploring avenues to lend money peer-to-peer to empower small business owners. “I recently donated through Kickstarter to help GuyManlyMovies, Boston-based local filmmakers, fund a film called Toothbrush.”

Though on one level, RelayRides is about assisting people to get from A to B in a more economical and less environmentally impacting way, it makes a notable contribution towards changing our attitudes towards the things we own, and as Christina believes, “Many people making small changes together can make big change happen.”

Lauren Anderson is a writer and Project Director, building the movement of Collaborative Consumption.

This article was first published on Shareable.net

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