new city carshare math...

i'm a longtime city carshare member, and i'm also a subcontractor who uses some of their technology. when they announced their new pricing plans, i sat down to pencil out if the new sharePlus would be a good deal for me and i thought i'd post it for others to look at. all of this information is based on public and member-facing information.

the old plan:

• $10/mo
• $4 peak, $2 offpeak
• 44¢ a mile
• long trips = call enterprise or pay a LOT (my one-night trip to Davis cost $230!)

new shareLocal plan (the default):

• $10/mo
• $5 peak, $1 offpeak
  == $88/day ($136 for premium cars)
• 40¢ a mile
• 4 extended freedom trips a year

new sharePlus plan:

• $20/mo
  == $120 more per year than shareLocal
  
• $5 peak, $0 offpeak
  == $80/day
• 40¢ a mile
• 10 extended freedom trips a year
  == 6 more than shareLocal
• no surcharge for premium cars

extended freedom trip:

• $40/day ($50/day for shareLocal members in a premium car)
  
• 10¢ a mile (200 max)
  == $20
  
• so a 200 mile, 24 hour trip will cost you $60
• that same trip on shareLocal without extended freedom
  == $168 ($88 hourly + $80 mileage), you save $108
  == $216 in a premium car, you save $156
  
• that same trip on sharePlus without extended freedom:
  == $160 ($80 hourly + $80 mileage), you save $100
  == $160 in a premium car (plus members pay no surcharge for premium), you save $100
  

whew! that's a lot of numbers... but returning to my mantra "you only have one decision to make -- is sharePlus for me?"

• joining sharePlus means $120 more per year.
  
• for that i get 6 extra EFs, meaning that they cost me about $12 each.
• since the base plan includes 4 EFs, it's really all about the 5th EF and beyond, isn't it? can you recoup your $120 in those 6 extra trips?
• take a car for a 24-hour, 200 mile EF trip and you save $100 in a single trip, so yeah, six long trips a year and you're "in the black" (because you get 4 on the basic shareLocal plan, you'd have to take two trips beyond those four, or six trips to breakeven).
  
• shorter trips can be cheaper with EFs, too -- i had dinner with my brother in San Jose (7 hours, 130 miles) and the EF saved me around $23. any trip over 100 miles is probably a good EF contender.

looking over my usage and my car rentals from last year, i'm pretty sure i'll have no trouble making the sharePlus pay for itself.

other thoughts:

• incentive to drive:
  carsharing in general has a tenuous relationship with the environment -- on one hand it can incent people to drive less and to become car-free, but on the other it can tempt the environmentally conscious to drive instead of taking public transport (or biking/walking).
  
  because this new type of trip makes driving cheaper, there's no question it will lead to an increase in driving. while my inner environmentalist tells me that's bad, it's also a huge issue of the "usability of the service". taking an occasional weekend to napa or carmel is one of the reasons having your own car is nice. i know plenty of folks who've done that with CCS and then had a heart attack when the bill comes. i even know people who've left CCS for Zipcar just to get themselves onto a predictable billing plan that allows them an easy "day rate" for those kinds of trips. extended freedom will dramatically expand the usefulness of CCS for me -- i dislike the hassle of renting a car when i need to get away, and i really dislike my monthly transportation costs quadrupling just because i went away for the weekend
  
  
• availability:
  historically CCS has had a difficult time keeping enough cars in their fleet to keep me as a member happy. unless they're planning a dramatic fleet expansion, this will make the availability problems worse.
  
  
• asterisks:
  lurking in the fine print you'll see that CCS has reserved the right to mark certain cars unavailable for EF trips. i'd prefer they expand their fleet rather than start making EFs harder and harder to use... how that will play out is yet to be seen.
  
  another major asterisk is the dramatic fees for altering, canceling or not showing up for an EF trip, make sure you read the fine print!
  
  CCS publicly committed to minimizing the number of premium cars in their fleet, so i completely disregarded the discounted premium cars in my calculations. i currently get a mini about 20% of the time that i want one.
  
  ditto for the late night driving. i'm not a candy raver anymore so the free midnight to 8am wasn't worth calculating. and while it's nice to be able to keep the car until morning (especially if you had to schlep your fat butt 4 pods away to find a car with availability), you don't save a thing if your car has a parking ticket on it when you get up in the morning to return it. (yes, that happend to me just a few days ago -- i have the worst parking karma!)
  
  lastly, i thought it was quite interesting that ONLY sharePlus members are allowed to purchase more EF trips. guess if you need 5 trips a year, you gotta buy 10...