[timun]

Originally Posted by Jacks

Disagree, people with private cars don't usually use short term street parking to park all day. Street parking is about $5/hr in the core, you're better off parking in a lot if you're there all day.

It seems you disagree with me because you perceived the Car2go Smart cars were stationary the whole day:

I don't know about recently but this is what I saw when they first came out. Rows of Smartcars that sucked up all of the street parking all day. I used to joke they were like Agent Smith, they just keep multiplying and taking over everything.

In my experience the turnover downtown was significant; maybe you just didn't perceive it because the Smart cars looked identical. I used to use Car2go to commute and for running business errands during the day, and usually the car I parked on the street at 8:00 was already gone by the time I needed it again at 8:30. However, it wasn't uncommon to see another Smart car in its place; if you weren't paying close attention you'd think it was only one car.

Originally Posted by browna

Given the geographical restrictions, not a surprise. It was Marda Loopers at the edge of the area, (my old boss was one of them) that instead of taking a fairly straightforward 10 min bus into Dt, they often took a C2g. Anywhere C2g serviced, it was basically replacing a very simple transit route. In the Beltline, people could walk to work as well and not need a C2g except on poor weather days.

Not gonna lie: I was one of those people too. I used to take transit downtown (although my trip was not a breezy 10 minutes; it was often >45 minutes including waiting time), and got sick of it. When Car2go started up service I was one of the very early members, and I drove them once or twice per day.

I stopped using the service regularly about 18 months ago as they shifted the make-up of their fleet from the Smart cars to Mercedes-Benz CLA and GLAs. I especially hate the CLAs with a passion (bigger exterior dimensions than you'd think, tiny on the inside, crappy transmission, nigh undriveable if not for the blindspot monitoring system and rear camera), and I was not enthused about paying 40% more for them than the Smarts. Given the price increases (per minute rates went up, $1 new trip fees were added up to a max of $90 per year, then the limit went up to $200 per year...) and the issues I had with availability—often requiring me to walk 20-30 minutes to get a car—I bit the bullet and started driving my own car downtown every day instead. It got to be too much of a pain in the ass to find them and I was spending upwards of $15/day, so at that point I figured I might as well spend about the same on parking and gas for my own car knowing that I'd have the convenience of being able to return to the exact same spot I'd parked it in. I went from using Car2go 300 times a year to about once every other month.