TED2007
Robin Chase: The idea behind Zipcar (and what comes next)
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Robin Chase founded Zipcar, the world’s biggest car-sharing business. That was one of her smaller ideas. Here she travels much farther, contemplating road-pricing schemes that will shake up our driving habits and a mesh network vast as the Interstate.
Robin Chase - Transport networker
With Zipcar, Robin Chase introduced car-crazy America to the concept of non-ownership. Now she's flipping that model with Buzzcar, which lets you rent your own auto to your neighbors. Full bio
With Zipcar, Robin Chase introduced car-crazy America to the concept of non-ownership. Now she's flipping that model with Buzzcar, which lets you rent your own auto to your neighbors. Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
00:12
I'm going to talk about two stories today.
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One is how we need to use market-based pricing to affect demand
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and use wireless technologies to dramatically reduce our emissions
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in the transportation sector.
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And the other is that there is an incredible opportunity
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if we choose the right wireless technologies;
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how we can generate a new engine for economic growth
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and dramatically reduce C02 in the other sectors.
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I'm really scared.
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We need to reduce C02 emissions in ten to fifteen years by 80 percent
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in order to avert catastrophic effects.
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And I am astounded that I'm standing here to tell you that.
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What are catastrophic effects? A three degree centigrade climate change rise
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that will result in 50 percent species extinction.
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It's not a movie. This is real life.
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And I'm really worried, because when people talk about cars
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-- which I know something about --
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the press and politicians and people in this room are all thinking,
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"Let's use fuel-efficient cars."
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If we started today, 10 years from now, at the end of this window of opportunity,
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those fuel-efficient cars will reduce our fossil fuel needs by four percent.
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That is not enough.
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But now I'll talk about some more pleasant things.
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Here are some ways that we can make some dramatic changes.
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So, Zipcar is a company that I founded seven years ago,
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but it's an example of something called car sharing.
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What Zipcar does is we park cars throughout dense urban areas
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for members to reserve, by the hour and by the day, instead of using their own car.
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How does it feel to be a person using a Zipcar?
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It means that I pay only for what I need.
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All those hours when a car is sitting idle, I'm not paying for it.
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It means that I can choose a car exactly for that particular trip.
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So, here's a woman that reserved MiniMia, and she had her day.
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I can take a BMW when I'm seeing clients.
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I can drive my Toyota Element when I'm going to go on that surfing trip.
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And the other remarkable thing is it's, I think, the highest status of car ownership.
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Not only do I have a fleet of cars available to me in seven cities around the world
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that I can have at my beck and call,
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but heaven forbid I would ever maintain
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or deal with the repair or have anything to do with it.
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It's like the car that you always wanted that your mom said that you couldn't have.
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I get all the good stuff and none of the bad.
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So, what is the social result of this?
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The social result is that today's Zipcar has 100,000 members
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driving 3,000 cars parked in 3,000 parking spaces.
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Instead of driving 12,000 miles a year, which is what the average city dweller does,
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they drive 500 miles a year. Are they happy?
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The company has been doubling in size ever since I founded it, or greater.
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People adore the company. And it's better,
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you know? They like it.
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So, how is it that people went from the 12,000 miles a year to 500 miles?
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It's because they said, "It's eight to 10 dollars an hour and 65 dollars a day.
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If I'm going to go buy some ice cream,
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do I really want to spend eight dollars to go buy the ice cream? Or maybe I'll do without.
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Maybe I would have bought the ice cream when I did some other errand."
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So, people really respond very quickly to it, to prices.
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And the last point I want to make is Zipcar would never be possible without technology.
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It required that it was completely trivial: that it takes 30 seconds
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to reserve a car, go get it, drive it.
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And for me, as a service provider,
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I would never be able to provide you a car for an hour
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if the transaction cost was anything.
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So, without these wireless technologies, this, as a concept, could never happen.
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So, here's another example. This company is GoLoco --
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I'm launching it in about three weeks --
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and I hope to do for ridesharing what I did for car sharing.
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This will apply to people across all of America.
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Today, 75 percent of the trips are single-occupancy vehicles,
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yet 12 percent of trips to work are currently carpool.
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And I think that we can apply social networks and online payment systems
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to completely change how people feel about ridesharing
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and make that trip much more efficient.
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And so when I think about the future,
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people will be thinking that sharing the ride with someone
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is this incredibly great social event out of their day.
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You know, how did you get to TED? You went with other TEDsters.
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How fabulous. Why would you ever want to go by yourself in your own car?
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How did you go food shopping? You went with your neighbor, what a great social time.
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You know it's going to really transform how we feel about travel,
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and it will also, I think, enhance our freedom of mobility.
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Where can I go today and who can I do it with?
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Those are the types of things that you will look at and feel.
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And the social benefits:
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the rate of single-occupancy vehicles is, I told you, 75 percent;
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I think we can get that down to 50 percent.
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The demand for parking, of course, is down, congestion and the CO2 emissions.
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One last piece about this, of course, is that it's enabled by wireless technologies.
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And it's the cost of driving that's making people want to be able to do this.
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The average American spends 19 percent of their income on their car,
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and there's a pressure for them to reduce that cost, yet they have no outlet today.
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So, the last example of this is congestion pricing, very famously done in London.
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It's when you charge a premium for people to drive on congested roads.
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In London, the day they turned the congestion pricing on,
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there was a 25 percent decrease in congestion overnight,
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and that's persisted for the four years in which they've been doing congestion pricing.
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And again, do people like the outcome?
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Ken Livingstone was reelected.
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So again, we can see that price plays an enormous role in people's willingness
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to reduce their driving behavior.
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We've tripled the miles that we drive since 1970 and doubled them since 1982.
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There's a huge slack in that system;
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with the right pricing we can undo that.
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Congestion pricing is being discussed in every major city around the world
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and is, again, wirelessly enabled.
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You weren't going to put tollbooths around the city of London
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and open and shut those gates.
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And what congestion pricing is is that it's a technology trial and a psychological trial
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for something called road pricing.
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And road pricing is where we're all going to have to go,
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because today we pay for our maintenance
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and wear and tear on our cars with gas taxes.
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And as we get our cars more fuel-efficient,
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that's going to be reducing the amount of revenue that you get off of those gas taxes,
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so we need to charge people by the mile that they drive.
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Whatever happens with congestion pricing and those technologies
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will be happening with road pricing.
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Why do we travel too much?
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Car travel is underpriced and therefore we over-consumed.
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We need to put this better market feedback.
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And if we have it, you'll decide how many miles to drive,
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what mode of travel, where to live and work.
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And wireless technologies make this real-time loop possible.
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So, I want to move now to the second part of my story,
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which is: when are we going to start doing
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this congestion pricing? Road pricing is coming.
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When are we going to do it? Are we going to wait
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10 to 15 years for this to happen
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or are we going to finally have this political will to make it happen in the next two years?
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Because I'm going to say, that is going to be the tool that's going to turn our usage overnight.
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And what kind of wireless technology are we going to use?
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This is my big vision.
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There is a tool that can help us bridge the digital divide,
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respond to emergencies, get traffic moving,
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provide a new engine for economic growth
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and dramatically reduce CO2 emissions in every sector.
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And this is a moment from "The Graduate." Do you remember this moment?
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You guys are going to be the handsome young guy
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and I'm going to be the wise businessman.
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"I want to say one word to you, just one word."
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"Yes, sir?" "Are you listening?" "Yes I am."
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"Ad-hoc peer-to-peer self-configuring wireless networks."
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(Laughter)
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These are also called mesh networks.
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And in a mesh, every device contributes to and expands the network,
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and I think you might have heard a little bit about it before.
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I'm going to give you some examples.
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You'll be hearing later today from Alan Kay.
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These laptops, when a child opens them up,
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they communicate with every single child in the classroom,
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within that school, within that village.
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And what is the cost of that communication system?
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Zero dollars a month.
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Here's another example: in New Orleans,
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video cameras were mesh-enabled
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so that they could monitor crime in the downtown French Quarter.
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When the hurricane happened,
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the only communication system standing was the mesh network.
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Volunteers flew in, added a whole bunch of devices,
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and for the next 12 months,
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mesh networks were the only wireless that was happening in New Orleans.
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Another example is in Portsmouth, U.K.
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They mesh-enabled 300 buses and they speak to these smart terminals.
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You can look at the terminal
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and be able to see precisely where your bus is on the street
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and when it's coming, and you can buy your tickets in real time.
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Again, all mesh-enabled. Monthly communication cost: zero.
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So, the beauty of mesh networks:
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you can have these very low-cost devices.
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Zero ongoing communication costs. Highly scalable;
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you can just keep adding them, and as in Katrina,
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you can keep subtracting them -- as long as there's some, we can still communicate.
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They're resilient; their redundancy is built into this fabulous decentralized design.
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What are the incredible weaknesses?
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There isn't anybody in Washington lobbying to make it happen --
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or in those municipalities, to build out their cities with these wireless networks --
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because there's zero ongoing communications cost.
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So, the examples that I gave you are these islands of mesh networks,
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and networks are interesting only as they are big.
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How do we create a big network?
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Are you guys ready again -- "The Graduate"?
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This time you will still play the handsome young thing, but I'll be the sexy woman.
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These are the next two lines in the movie.
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"Where did you do it?" "In his car."
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So you know, when you stick this idea ... (Laughter)
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where would we expect me, Robin Chase, to be thinking
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is imagine if we put a mesh-network device
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in every single car across America.
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We could have a coast-to-coast, free wireless communication system.
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I guess I just want you to think about that.
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And why is this going to happen? Because we're going to do congestion pricing,
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we are going to do road tolls,
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gas taxes are going to become road pricing.
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These things are going to happen.
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What's the wireless technology we're going to use?
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Maybe we should use a good one. When are we going to do it?
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Maybe we shouldn't wait for the 10 or 15 years for this to happen.
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We should pull it forward.
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So, I'd like us to launch the wireless Internet interstate wireless mesh system,
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and require that this network be accessible to everyone, with open standards.
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Right now in the transportation sector, we're creating these wireless devices --
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I guess you guys might have Fast Pass here or Easy Lane --
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that are single-purpose devices in these closed networks.
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What is the point?
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We're transferring just a few little data bits
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when we're doing road controlling, road pricing.
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We have this incredible excess capacity.
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So, we can provide the lowest-cost means of going wireless coast-to-coast,
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we can have resilient nationwide communication systems,
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we have a new tool for creating efficiencies in all sectors.
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Imagine what happens when the cost of getting information
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from anywhere to anywhere is close to zero.
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What you can do with that tool: we can create an economic engine.
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Information should be free, and access to information should be free,
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and we should be charging people for carbon.
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I think this is a more powerful tool than the Interstate Highway Act,
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and I think this is as important and world changing
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to our economy as electrification.
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And if I had my druthers,
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we would have an open-source version in addition to open standards.
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And this open-source version means that
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it could be -- if we did a brilliant job of it --
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it could be used around the world very quickly.
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So, going back to one of my earlier thoughts.
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Imagine if every one of these buses in Lagos was part of the mesh network.
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When I went this morning to Larry Brilliant's TEDTalk prize
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-- his fabulous networks --
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imagine if there was an open-source
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mesh communications device that can be put into those networks,
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to make all that happen.
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And we can be doing it if we could just get over the fact that
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this little slice of things is going to be for free.
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We could make billions of dollars on top of it,
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but this one particular slice of communications needs to be open source.
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So, let's take control of this nightmare:
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implement a gas tax immediately;
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transition across the nation to road-tolling with this wireless mesh;
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require that the mesh be open to all, with open standards;
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and, of course, use mesh networks.
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Thank you. (Applause)
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Robin Chase - Transport networkerWith Zipcar, Robin Chase introduced car-crazy America to the concept of non-ownership. Now she's flipping that model with Buzzcar, which lets you rent your own auto to your neighbors.
Why you should listen
If she weren't a proven entrepreneur, you might imagine Robin Chase as a transportation geek, a dedicated civil servant, endlessly refining computer models of freeway traffic. If she weren't such a green-conscious problem-solver, you might take her for a startup whiz. Case in point: In 2000, Chase focused her MIT business training on a car-sharing scheme imported from Europe and co-founded Zipcar, now the largest car-sharing business in the world. Using a wireless key, location awareness and Internet billing, members pick up Zipcars at myriad locations anytime they want one.
Now Chase has launched Buzzcar, a car-sharing service in France with a twist: instead of a fleet of green Zipcars, the service lets users share their own cars and make money off their unused capacity. Call it peer-to-peer auto rental.
Read this insightful interview with Chase about starting a business and raising kids (including a supermodel).
Robin Chase | Speaker | TED.com