Wacky off-the-wall traffic idea
Haven't updated in forever. Time for a random contextless post!
So I've started getting up and going in to work earlier, for various reasons. This means I can, for example, theoretically take advantage of certain commuting options that my earlier 10 AM-8PM work hours made infeasible, like taking the bus to work.
And today would have been the first day I would have tried out the new bus system... except that I had a doctor's appointment, so I needed to have the car here with me today. On the way in, while waiting behind lines of cars, it occurred to me that it would've been so much more convenient if I could've taken the bus anyway and still magically had the car waiting for me at the office when I got there.
Which leads me to my wacky idea: corporate errand rental cars.
Here's the idea. Big Company provides a certain number of rental cars in a certain number of stalls on their parking lot for use by people who ride the bus or carpool or whatever, but need to have a car during the day to get to a doctor's appointment or something. You'd present your company ID to an attendant (or an automated stall or something, depends on how you want to design the system), they'd give you a key, you go do your thing, you drop off the car, go back to work. Then you take the bus home. You didn't take up a slot for a single-rider car on the freeway, you saved gas, you saved the planet, and you were still able to run your errands during the day.
Now, there are tons of problems with this. Let's start with the obvious ones first:
Problem: Theft
What's to stop someone just driving off with one of the cars?
Solutions:
Partner with a rental car company to administer the details, including the maintenance of the fleet itself. Rental car companies have spent decades learning how to manage the details of maintaining a fleet of rental cars, including rental car theft. In addition, Big Company has advantages a private rental car company doesn't, such as:
GPS tracking. These are company cars, not private cars. There's less expectation of privacy. The Big Company has a lot more hold on the person renting the car than your average rental car company, who generally doesn't have anything more than an address and a credit card number. Someone who's suspected of stealing one of the errand cars can be threatened with disciplinary action, loss of job, etc. (It helps if the Big Company is in a business where most of the employees' jobs are worth more than a new car, too. :) Indeed, this scheme probably isn't cost effective for any other kind of business.) These are intended to be checked out over the day, so make it a policy that the cars are to be returned in the evening, say, by 7:00 PM, and that any car left out after that had better have been reported stolen or we'll do it for you. (People might fradulently report the car stolen, but they do that with ordinary rental cars too. See above about how rental car companies have evolved ways to deal with that sort of thing.)
Problem: Lack of cars
What happens when everyone decides they want to check out a car to go to lunch and there's none left for the person who actually has to go to the doctor?
Solutions:
Require reservations between 11:30 AM and 1:30 PM. The primary use case for this system is someone who took the bus in to work knowing they would need a car that day; they can reserve their car when they make the appointment.
If there is a chronic shortage of lunch-hour cars even with reservations, announce a policy that the cars are not to be used for lunch breaks; even if you don't do much enforcement of that policy, voluntary compliance should free up enough cars for the people who really need them (unless you've got a badly dysfunctional corporate culture, in which case you have bigger problems).
In a pinch, provide cab service for the handful of people who really need a ride to their appointment. This should be considered a stopgap until you can add more errant cars to the system, unless adding more cars is a problem (see the next entry).
Problem: Lack of parking for other people
If you're in the US (and this system is being proposed for the US), most people don't take the bus, and most people don't carpool. This means that parking at the office is often scarce. And this means that all those single-rider drivers are going to be resentful when you close off a huge whack of their parking spots to be taken up by these errand cars. And most of them aren't going to be too impressed when you tell them to just take the bus.
Solutions:
This solution only works if you're a growing Big Company: Implement your initial pilot program only when you are finishing construction of a brand new parking lot. Only use spaces out of the new parking lot to park the errand cars; people will be less psychologically inclined to treat these as "lost" spaces, since they never had them in the first place. Only when people are getting used to the idea and bus ridership is increasing (and parking lot usage is decreasing!) should you consider putting a few errand cars in your existing parking lots.
It's probably too expensive to be workable, even for a Big Company like Microsoft, but damn it'd be convenient. :)
So I've started getting up and going in to work earlier, for various reasons. This means I can, for example, theoretically take advantage of certain commuting options that my earlier 10 AM-8PM work hours made infeasible, like taking the bus to work.
And today would have been the first day I would have tried out the new bus system... except that I had a doctor's appointment, so I needed to have the car here with me today. On the way in, while waiting behind lines of cars, it occurred to me that it would've been so much more convenient if I could've taken the bus anyway and still magically had the car waiting for me at the office when I got there.
Which leads me to my wacky idea: corporate errand rental cars.
Here's the idea. Big Company provides a certain number of rental cars in a certain number of stalls on their parking lot for use by people who ride the bus or carpool or whatever, but need to have a car during the day to get to a doctor's appointment or something. You'd present your company ID to an attendant (or an automated stall or something, depends on how you want to design the system), they'd give you a key, you go do your thing, you drop off the car, go back to work. Then you take the bus home. You didn't take up a slot for a single-rider car on the freeway, you saved gas, you saved the planet, and you were still able to run your errands during the day.
Now, there are tons of problems with this. Let's start with the obvious ones first:
Problem: Theft
What's to stop someone just driving off with one of the cars?
Solutions:
Partner with a rental car company to administer the details, including the maintenance of the fleet itself. Rental car companies have spent decades learning how to manage the details of maintaining a fleet of rental cars, including rental car theft. In addition, Big Company has advantages a private rental car company doesn't, such as:
Problem: Lack of cars
What happens when everyone decides they want to check out a car to go to lunch and there's none left for the person who actually has to go to the doctor?
Solutions:
Problem: Lack of parking for other people
If you're in the US (and this system is being proposed for the US), most people don't take the bus, and most people don't carpool. This means that parking at the office is often scarce. And this means that all those single-rider drivers are going to be resentful when you close off a huge whack of their parking spots to be taken up by these errand cars. And most of them aren't going to be too impressed when you tell them to just take the bus.
Solutions:
This solution only works if you're a growing Big Company: Implement your initial pilot program only when you are finishing construction of a brand new parking lot. Only use spaces out of the new parking lot to park the errand cars; people will be less psychologically inclined to treat these as "lost" spaces, since they never had them in the first place. Only when people are getting used to the idea and bus ridership is increasing (and parking lot usage is decreasing!) should you consider putting a few errand cars in your existing parking lots.
It's probably too expensive to be workable, even for a Big Company like Microsoft, but damn it'd be convenient. :)