Zip-a-dee-ZipCar

Well, I've finally sealed my commitment to being car-free in Boston. I've gone and joined Zip Car.

For those who don't live in cities where there is no Zip Car (pretty much large cities where car ownership is little more than a colossal pain in the butt, the service rents out cars by the hour. This lets you run an errand, grab lunch with friends in the 'burbs, get yourself to one of those big-box stores that aren't generally found downtown, without having to rent a car for the day.

ZipCar "plants" cars at convenient locations in urban neighborhoods: parking garages, gas stations. You make your reservation online for the block of time you're interested in, the pickup location and the make/model of car you want to drive, then head on over to pick it up.

Your membership card - there's both a very reasonable one-time charge for joining, plus an also reasonable annual fee - is the smart card you use to unlock the door, and away you go.

Unlike with a rental car, the cost of gas and insurance are built in - all incorporated in a flat rate. If you have to fill-er-up, there's a gas card above the visor: you don't go out of pocket. Similarly, if the ZipCar car is located in a garage, they've taken care of the parking fees.

The hourly rates aren't free - they claim that they have rates starting at $9/hour, but the cheapest rate for any car near where I live is $10/hour for a Mazda. You pay more for the privilege of driving something large and/or fun: Mini Cooper, SVU, BMW. But if you don't need a car for the day, it's a lot cheaper than a rental.

A few weeks ago, before I joined ZipCar, I rented a car to get out to a suburban client's office for a one hour meeting, to the tune of $63. Earlier this week, I used ZipCar to get to an hour meeting - different client but, weirdly, same office park - and it cost $42. (Four hours @ $10/hour plus tax.)

Now, if I'd been using my own car for this jaunt, I wouldn't really have needed 4 full hours, as the client site was only about 15 minutes if the traffic gods are with you. But traffic gods being the malevolent brutes that they are, you can't really count on there being no snarls and tangles, so with ZipCar, you need to pad your estimates of how long the trip will take so that you can get it back into its parking space in time for the next ZipCar member to pick it up. If you don't, there's a Late Fee that starts at $50. (I never want to find out where it ends.) You can call in if you find you're going to be late, but I don't know what the financial implications - if any - there are to that.

On my first date, I got the car back with maybe half an hour to spare, but - since I'd deliberately blocked out some comfort time - I wasn't rushed a the client, so was able to hang around and meet more team members, catch up with a former colleague who works there, etc., without feeling like Cinderella with her magic coach about to turn into a pumpkin.

From sign up, to reservation, to picking up the car, to returning it, to getting my invoice e-mailed to me, the entire process was pretty darned near flawless.

The only hitch for me - once I figured out where the parking pass was - turned out to be that the car had one of those weird-ball faux manual shifts. If I'd read the fine print when I made the reservation, I would have known what the "M" meant on the gear box.

It took me a few minutes of going, "hmmmm, this car sounds like it's in second, what's with that" to figure out that M- meant downshift, M+ meant upshift, and that the number on the dashboard was, indeed, telling me what gear I was in.

Having driven standard shift cars for so long, the clutchless shifting was too weird for me, so I just threw it into "D" (which I discovered just about the same time it dawned on me what "M" was for). The default setting for driving the Mazda was "M", not "D", which I suppose makes sense, given that someone buying one is likely doing so deliberately so that they can have this semi-automatic or semi-standard or whatever it's called experience.

(Is the "M" option something that's designed to ease the transition of Boomers who've decided it's too damn aggravating to drive a standard in stop and go situations? Not to mention that, given the general paucity of makes and models to choose from if you're looking for a standard, I wouldn't be surprised to find that people would elect the "M' so that they could retain some of the flavor of driving a manual shift. And is the term "standard shift" even used anymore? It must be a relic of those long ago days - well before my drive time - when a manual was standard, and an automatic was some fancy extra furbelow.)

Driving in "M" seemed a little bogus to me, but Ill be given it a whirl again soon. (I've already signed up for two more excursions using the Mazda.)

I've read that the "standard" rent-a-car places - Avis, Hertz, Enterprise - are all looking at some kind of rent by the hour option so that they can compete with ZipCar. I don't see them able to get to the level that ZipCar has gotten to anytime soon, with it's convenient 24/7 pick-up/drop-off locations, and everything else that's part of a model that was designed from the outset for short-duration rentals. (You can, by the way, also rent a Zip car for the day, but I think their tilt point is about 6 hours. Up to that magic moment, ZipCar is cheaper; beyond that, a rental car is.)

In any case, my ZipCar experience to date has been nigh unto flawless, and, personally, I'm delighted to have one more reason not to ever again own a car.

My, oh, my, oh, what a wonderful day it is when you can use ZipCar rather than worry about moving your car for the street sweepers, shoveling it out, or finding a darned parking place to begin with.

Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay...