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

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Hawaii wins more than $400,000 in EPA Grants
    November 27, 2018
    The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has awarded $411,578 in Diesel Emission Reduction Act (DERA) grants to Hawaii to help curb pollution from diesel vehicle sources. The EPA’s West Coast Collaborative administers the DERA programme. This partnership, which combines the EPA’s Pacific Southwest and Pacific Northwest Regions, utilises public and private funds in a bid to reduce emissions. The Hawaii Department of Health (HDOH) intends to use the grant to replace two diesel transit buses with batter
  • Parsons accepting entries for smart city challenge
    August 28, 2019
    Engineering firm Parsons and its partners have launched a global smart cities challenge called Transforming Intersections aimed at reducing the time drivers spend at red lights. Chuck Harrington, chairman of Parsons, says: “Our goal is to give cities the opportunity to increase their mobility, reduce their carbon footprint through reduced idling of vehicles, and keep their city moving." Parsons says the winner will receive a one-year free trial of its Intelligent Intersection product, which allows ci
  • Car2Go launches e-car rental service in central Paris
    January 17, 2019
    Daimler subsidiary Car2go has made its electric car rental service available to Parisian users in a 77km square area within the city’s Périphérique motorway. Drivers are charged between €0.24 to €0.34 per minute depending on the location and time of the rental, and can charge the vehicles at around 1,100 charging stations in the French capital. The details flesh out Car2go’s announcement last year of plans to deploy 400 electric Smart EQ Fortwo vehicles in the city. The company intends to add more ve
  • Enhanced WISETRIP final event
    August 20, 2014
    The Enhanced WISETRIP final event, which takes place in Brussels on 29 August, will provide an opportunity to showcase the achievements of the Enhanced WISETRIP project and contribute to the debate on priorities for delivering EU-wide multi-modal travel information. Enhanced WISETRIP has developed a unified intermodal planner for international journeys which incorporates functions for planning, booking and travelling multimodal journeys adapted to user needs including multiple trip criteria, environment