Oh well, that was great while it lasted. As of the end of this year, Lime will no longer have car share in Seattle. I got an email telling me so. The little Audi cars scattered across the city will start to disappear starting next month then will be gone. Lime will keep its bike share business. And, another car share program, Reach, another car share program, also did itself in not too long ago. We still have Car2Go in the city, but it is more expensive than reach. How long before I get an email saying they’re shutting down too? I’m not looking forward to it. And as if that wasn’t enough, the geniuses at City Hall now want to hit ride share services with additional per ride tax to pay for what? Inefficient non-profit housing. This was the same week that people did a “climate strike.” Nobody, of course, can see the irony if not hypocrisy here.
I wrote back to Lime. Here’s what I said:
This is a disaster. It’s bad news.
What has been the major motivator in my consideration of getting rid of my personal vehicle? Car share programs.
Yes, it is CAR share. And yes there are emissions associated with your cars; but I think they support living without a car and thus can contribute, over all to fewer cars on the road and fewer emissions.
I’d love to know why this is ending. Car share is transformative. It means the convenience of access without having to own. That saves money. And if people can live in dense, urban neighborhoods without a car and without commuting every day, it also saves our planet.
I wish you’d reconsider this move.
Roger–
Instead of climate strikes and other non-sense, the City should have done whatever Lime needed to keep the program alive. I don’t know the back story, but intuitively I can tell you it probably had something to do with the City simply not caring about trying to help a private business make a good thing more financially viable. My guess is that the costs of maintaining the fleet are high, and to keep competitive pricing Lime probably needed more cash or regulatory relief. That’s a guess. But if I was Mayor I wouldn’t have let it happen, even if it meant buying the business and having the City take the financial loses. We do it with transit all day long.
As for the tax on Lyft and Uber. All I can say is, “Jesus!” It’s a prayer and exclamation. This will happen, and $52,000,000 will be extorted out of ride share to build 500 units of housing. That’s laughable, except it is also tragic. I’ll say it again, they’ll never build that many units with that money. By the time the bribe we pay to use ride share gets laundered by City bureaucracy it won’t be $52 million. And non-profit housing doesn’t cost $100,000 per unit which is what that number (yes, I know, leverage!) of 500 units is based on. Even with tax credits and other funding, the average cost for these units is still around $350,000 per unit. That means 3 and a half times $52 million, or around $180,000,000 for those 500 units total.
Where will the rest of the money be taken from? Don’t worry, there are plenty of funds out there in people’s pockets. And how will the shake down happen? Well, we’ll tax developers who make housing, that’s already underway with Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning (MIZ) called Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA). Those greedy bastards will pay their fair share. But see, they won’t. All that money comes from higher housing prices either when rents go up to rationalize the fee, or housing doesn’t get built because the cost gets too high. That just makes the problem of high price worse. Who cares, as long as the non-profits get more cash.
Well, I guess we can always hitchhike. It’s low tech, but it works. Is anyone going to San Antone?
Charlie Pride is one of the all time greats of country music. If you aren’t already, you ought to watch Ken Burns documentary playing and streaming at PBS. Another reason I mourn the lost of the LimePod is that they had access to Sirius satellite radio which features three great country stations, including Willie Nelson’s Willie’s Roadhouse. Every trip had the potential to discover a new old country song. Most of the Car2Go cars have the service as well.
