

The Zipcar Prize proposal: enabling one-way car sharing trips - troydavis
http://troy.yort.com/zipcar-prize-user-sourced-car-sharing-assignm

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hugh3
Rather misleading title, since it's not actually about a prize, it's about a
prize that some guy thinks should exist.

The problem of allowing one-way rentals is not one that I think Zipcar is
particularly interested in solving. No matter how you slice it, it winds up
leading to a less efficient allocation of parking spots than the current one
spot per car model, it increases the probability of a pissed-off customer who
finds that the car from his local spot has semi-permanently vanished to four
hundred miles away and nobody is currently planning on one-waying another one
in, and it wouldn't necessarily lead to enough increased revenue to make these
two downsides worthwhile. In fact it might well lead to less revenue, since
someone making (say) an overnight round trip could just book two one-ways
instead of a return and wind up saving money.

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troydavis
I don't think the title is misleading, and it definitely isn't intentionally.
Half of the post is an email to Zipcar proposing it, and the title needs to be
short.

I think the other issues you identified are real, are solvable, and are
addressed in the post.

The post explicitly says not to allow a one-way trip to empty out a
lot/neighborhood (permanently vanished car). An "I miss this car" button on
the Web site would make it easier for Zipcar to know when to reward someone
for parking a specific car type in a given lot.

In many cities, Zipcar has dozens of cars in the urban core. The use here is
going from Seattle to Bellevue or Mountain View to San Jose, not BFE 1 to BFE
2.

I agree that Zipcar hasn't been not particularly interested in solving this
problem. I think that may change now that they have competition in most
markets.

As far as less revenue, most of the trips this enables aren't happening today
because so few people spend $60-$80 (day rate) to drive 30 minutes then park
for 8 hours.

If someone could book two one-ways cheaper than a round-trip, it would be
because it's helping Zipcar. If my driving balances out two one-way trips
booked earlier, I'm helping reduce Zipcar's costs by slightly altering my
behavior (driving different cars).

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Groxx
No, I think it's pretty definitively misleading without context. And there's a
simple, short solution: "The Zipcar Prize proposal: ..."

~~~
troydavis
Thanks. Title changed.

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AndrewWarner
I think the bigger problem with zipcar is having a car sit around for hours
while you're visiting a friend or sight-seeing.

As a zipcar user, I often want to drive somewhere that's 30 minutes away and
stay there for 5-8 hours. That means I'd have to pay for the 5-8 hours that
the car just sits around. (Which means I just skip it and hunt for a cab.)

On the reverse side, on sunny weekends, I often can't find a car to rent.
Since I live near a part of the city that's a big draw on the weekends, I bet
there are Zipcar customers who visit my neighborhood and leave their Zipcars
in parking lots all day. I would pay extra to use their cars for a few hours.

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ajju
Zipcar's hourly pricing is so low because the rental for these extra 'waiting'
hours is built in. If you are driving at 60 miles per hour and the car gives
20 miles per gallon, the cost of driving for one hour is over $10 at current
gas prices. Zipcar's hourly rentals don't cost much more than $10.

Your idea of using cars others have parked locally is a good one, although I
wonder how many people rent zipcars for 7-10 hours and park it for 5-8. It
would be almost certainly cheaper to rent by the day from Enterprise et al if
you did that.

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AndrewWarner
It often is cheaper to rent by the day from companies like Budget, but zipcar
is incredibly convenient. In DC, I have 5 locations within 4 blocks. The major
car rental companies are all 1 cab ride away.

~~~
ajju
I really like your idea but if Zipcar let you rent someone else's parked car,
and you were late, they would almost certainly lose the stranded customer.

I know how much people hate waiting for a ride because my startup RideCell
worked on real-time carpooling for some time before we pivoted to fleet
automation. Even now, one of the main problems our product solves is reducing
wait time for transport/service vehicles by auto-dispatching tasks to the
nearest one, routing them intelligently, and making the wait more bearable by
letting people track their transport/service vehicles (Think Uber for
everything).

Of course, the fact that this is a hard problem makes it even more interesting
:)

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ansy
The point of the Netflix prize was to improve something Netflix already
understood well and was getting diminishing returns for its research dollar.
The Netflix Prize was able to attract serious interest from legitimate
academics and engineers because the problem was refined to the point where it
was legitimately very hard.

ZipCar doesn't even offer one-way car trips. I'm sure it could do them with
adjustments to inventory, management, and pricing. Traditional car rentals are
evidence there is a model that works. But ZipCar needs start one-way car
trips, much less get to the point where it has reached diminishing returns on
its research investment, before it can expect worthwhile contributions from
crowd sourcing.

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impendia
Isn't this already done by (for example) U-Haul? They would quickly go out of
business if you couldn't rent a truck one-way, or if they couldn't manage
their inventory.

U-Haul's business model is not precisely the same as Zipcar's, but it's pretty
close.

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shivam14
Car2Go (a Daimler company) is tackling this problem with the concept of an
operating area. You can pick up and drop of your car from a car2go designated
spot or any legal parking spot within this area. Here is an example of their
operating area in Austin

[http://www.car2go.com/portal/austin/page/mybookings/mapEnlar...](http://www.car2go.com/portal/austin/page/mybookings/mapEnlarged.faces)

They are also innovative on other fronts such as charging by the minute and a
feature-rich touchscreen in each car.

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ollysb
The ultimate car service would allow me to find a car a short walk from where
I am and then do a one way trip, without a booking. I've always felt that the
only barrier to providing this service was a critical mass of drivers and
zipcars. Most cars are currently idle for the majority of their lifetime,
taking up a lot of parking space. Imagine if the streets were lined with
shared cars instead of privately owned cars. Once you get to a certain density
you should be able guarantee availability in all but the most remote
locations. There are large scale migrations like commuting that take place
over the day/week but the availability of cars should match this. Given a
rising population density it seems inevitable that such a service will have to
exist as we will run out of storage space for idle cars.

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macrael
Do any zipcar-like rental companies allow you to return the car to somewhere
other than where you picked it up? Doing so obviously dramatically changes the
complexity of reservations. It is a feature that more traditional rental
operations can offer only because they have very large centralized
inventories. Even so, they still have to orchestrate moving cars from popular
destinations back to popular origins.

The proposed solution is definitely interesting, and I think it might be
possible to make it workable, but I think it is a different order of
complexity from the Netflix prize.

~~~
kareemm
Just signed up for Car2Go.com in Vancouver, which launched here this month and
offers one-way rentals.

Their model is per-minute pricing with an hourly cap.

You "return" it by parking it anywhere within a huge area (several square
miles) that effectively makes up anywhere you'd be car-sharing anyways (living
outside this area means you'd be pretty likely to own a car).

You find a car to rent with their android or iphone app, website, or by
calling their 24/7 phone number. All cars are tracked using GPS.

Pretty sweet model that is a good substitute for taxis, assuming the car
supply keeps up with consumer demand.

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marciovm123
Is it just me or does this smell like a great social media job by Car2Go.com?

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orijing
I think the solution would be variable pricing, much like buying or selling a
financial asset. If the rates for things could be adjusted to encourage
activity around some number (say, to keep the number of available cars in a
region at 1 for every 10 zipcar members), using some real data, they could
just let people drive cars one-way. If it turns out that everyone wants to
borrow a car from A and return to B, that just means it's too cheap to do so,
or it's too expensive to borrow from B and return to A.

It would certainly be an interesting model to try.

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alooPotato
I worked on developing a model like this while at the Media Lab. We were
trying to model dynamic pricing for one way rentals (with and without
restrictions as described on this thread) but ultimately found it very
difficult to simulate due to the lack of data.

We tried using proxy data by scraping popular bike sharing websites but it
didn't seem analogous enough. Any ideas where to get zipcars reservation data
with zipcar offering such a prize?

