Skip to main content

Zipcar founder: ‘Car-dominant city has reached its zenith’

Zipcar co-founder Robin Chase has called on urban authorities to embrace multimodal transport in a bid to improve mobility.“The value of a car-dominant city has reached its zenith,” she says in an interview with ITS International. “The city regulatory and physical infrastructure has been built on a personal car-dominant infrastructure. We have spent the last 100 years making car travel in cities the most convenient and cheapest way to the exclusion of everything else.” That creates problems, she
May 23, 2018 Read time: 2 mins

3874 Zipcar co-founder Robin Chase has called on urban authorities to embrace multimodal transport in a bid to improve mobility.

“The value of a car-dominant city has reached its zenith,” she says in an interview with ITS International. “The city regulatory and physical infrastructure has been built on a personal car-dominant infrastructure. We have spent the last 100 years making car travel in cities the most convenient and cheapest way to the exclusion of everything else.”

That creates problems, she continues. “Today, mayors and cities are signalling by price that they are indifferent as to whether you take your zero emissions and small footprint bike or a 25 year-old car that pollutes heavily or indeed a shared taxi or public transit. Currently the city is signalling that ‘all those things are the same to us’.”

Chase, who also spoke at ITS International’s 8545 MaaS Market Atlanta conference, is keen to avoid demonising the car as a travel mode - but is not convinced that developments such as automated vehicles will ease congestion.

She is one of the influencers behind the recently-published %$Linker: 2 External <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?><dictionary /> 0 0 0 link-external Shared Mobility Principles Shared Mobility Principles website link false https://www.sharedmobilityprinciples.org/ false false%> developed by a group of NGOs and adopted by a range of public bodies and mobility players.

The principles call for fair pricing of different mobility options. “The point of doing road congestion pricing and kerb access pricing is so we can start getting at fair user fees across all modes,” she insists. “Personal cars are not paying a fair share and because of that we have been responding to the wrong price signals which is why we don't have enough walking, biking or shared transport modes.”

  • For full interview and MaaS Market Atlanta report, see ITS International May/June issue, out soon

Related Content

  • November 30, 2018
    London comes first for public transport but suffers from congested roads, says Here Technologies
    London has the best public transport system in the world - but the UK capital’s roads are among the most congested, says a new report. Here Technologies’ Urban Mobility Index ranked transit efficiency in 38 cities based on their public transport frequency, density and coverage as well as how public transport performs against car speed. Just behind London are Zurich, Toronto, Washington, DC and Stockholm. However, London was ranked 34th for congestion. The top five least-congested cities are: H
  • September 4, 2018
    Petrol/diesel cars could be fined for using London’s ‘electric streets’
    Drivers in London, UK, could be fined £130 for not using electric or hybrid vehicles on nine ‘electric streets’. The project is intended to cut pollution and improve air quality. Drivers of petrol and diesel cars will be restricted from using some roads in the Shoreditch and Old Street areas of the city between 7am-10am and 4pm-7pm on weekdays.
  • January 30, 2019
    MaaS Market London: rising tide won’t lift all transport providers
    In his keynote address to the second day of ITS International’s MaaS Market Conference (London, 20-21 March), connected vehicle expert Frederic Bruneteau will consider ‘The harsh reality of urban mobility: Winners and losers in the MaaS value chain’. The founder and managing director of Ptolemus Consulting, Bruneteau will argue that while Mobility as a Service (MaaS) may replace 2.3 billion car journeys by 2023, not all service providers will benefit – evidence of which is becoming increasingly apparent.
  • December 10, 2018
    Waymo trials commercial driverless taxi service in Phoenix, Arizona
    Waymo has launched a driverless taxi service in Phoenix, Arizona, where riders will be charged for the journeys they take. In a blog post, CEO John Krafcik says the commercial self-driving service – called Waymo One - is available to early riders who have already been using Waymo’s technology. The company hopes to make the service available to more members of the public as it adds more vehicles and drives in more places, he writes. “Self-driving technology is new to many, so we’re proceeding carefully wi