In 1997, my friends and I began to organize a carsharing cooperative in San Francisco as a way to test our theories about alternative institutions. We first learned about carsharing from an article published in 1994 in RAIN Magazine. Two brothers in Berlin had started an organization called Stattauto Berlin, which literally translates to “instead of cars.” The general idea is this: A co-op owns a fleet of cars and keeps them all over the city. Members of the co-op can use a car when they want. They pay based on how much they drive. It’s that simple.
In the case of Stattauto, which started in 1988, members made reservations by phone; an employee of the organization took calls and kept track of reservations. Keys were kept in a lockbox at each parking location, and members had the combination. People wrote down in log books how far they drove. There was an hourly fee and a mileage fee—the idea being that the hourly rate roughly covered the capital cost of the car and the mileage rate roughly covered the gas and the wear and tear. Membership in the organization included insurance.