Getaround Tesla by David Ingram licensed under Creative Commons.

One week B.C. (Before Coronavirus), DC councilmember Brandon Todd (Ward 4) surprised a lot of people with an announcement, posted to Twitter, of a new bill to limit car sharing. It sounded like Todd, responding to some residents who complain about services like Zipcar or Free2Move, was looking to ban or significantly limit these services.

However, that’s not what Todd was trying to do, according to a later statement and his spokesperson Eric Feldman. Rather, Todd is taking aim at a set of other services including DriveWhip and Getaround, where there have been reports of some abuses.

What’s going on, and is there a problem?

About car-sharing

Car-sharing services let people essentially rent a car which is parked in their own neighborhoods. With Zipcar, cars have a dedicated home parking spot; you rent then return it to the same place. Other services like Free2Move let people can find a car using an app, drive it, and then park it elsewhere. DC also previously had car2go and Maven until last year.

There’s also “peer to peer” car sharing, like Getaround, where individuals with cars can let other people rent them, Zipcar-style, when they’re not being used. This is more analogous to Airbnb, which started to let people rent out their own homes or rooms in them when they’re otherwise empty.

There have been periodic complaints on neighborhood listservs about car sharing services. Some residents who don’t use Zipcar or car2go complained about their presence in neighborhood street parking, potentially making it slightly harder for that resident to find a space.

The counter-argument was that if the car was there residents of the neighborhood were using it, and they’d enable people to live without having their own car, actually reducing parking demand. Zipcar’s 2018 research found that each Zipcar led to 13 fewer personal cars on the road; 54% of members said they got rid of a personal car after joining, and “round-trip car-sharing members drive 40% fewer miles than they did previously (reducing emissions).” Here’s one first person account of switching from private car to car2go/Free2Move and non-car transportation.

Todd criticizes “reckless” car sharing, faces criticism

It sounded at first like Brandon Todd was responding to these kinds of complaints with his bill, which he announced on March 3 by saying, “I have heard time and time again from residents that out-of-state carsharing companies are recklessly leaving cars on our neighborhood streets.”

Many residents, including notable former city leaders, immediately blasted this apparent attack on the whole idea of car sharing.

There were also comments about how his initial statement criticized people for sleeping in cars, while some people experiencing homelessness have unfortunately been forced to sleep in cars (often their own, though we can’t know.) In fact, some west coast communities have designated parking lots specifically for people without homes.

Todd’s tweet earned 68 replies, almost all negative, compared to 6 retweets and 25 likes. In Twitter parlance this is referred to as “getting ratioed,” where the number of responses (which might be disagreements) vastly outnumber retweets and likes (which tend to represent agreement).

A number of of the replies noted that these services are already registered with the DC government, and so a bill to require them to register would have no effect.

Todd clarifies his intent

Todd’s legislative assistant Sam Stephens quickly spoke up on Twitter to clarify that they certainly do understand that Zipcar and Free2Move have legal permits to operate. Their intent, he said, was not to attack these already-legal services.

Instead, spokesperson Eric Feldman explained, there are some that are not following these policies, such as, he said, a service called DriveWhip or users of the Getaround platform. DriveWhip offers cars for rent mostly for a full day, for people who want to drive for Uber, Lyft, or Via but don’t have a car or one in good enough condition.

Feldman said DriveWhip and other services have been placing cars on residential blocks in areas of Ward 4 like Chevy Chase, Riggs Park, or Crestwood that have no residential parking limitations. Unlike areas where people without a ward sticker can only park for two hours, there’s no time limit on parking in many low-density blocks farther from commercial areas, including in Ward 4 and elsewhere in DC. These services, Feldman said, would deposit large qualities of cars on these blocks and then tell potential ride-hail drivers where to go pick them up, then have the drivers return them to that area.

There is another law, called Registration of Out-of-State Automobiles or ROSA, which prohibits parking a non-DC-registered block for more than 60 days. The idea is to apply to people who move to DC with their out-of-state car. It’s not legal to simply live in DC long term without switching to a DC driver license or re-registering a car in DC, and so ROSA gives an enforcement mechanism.

It’s not meant for this kind of thing, Feldman explained, and he argued the services in question are simply rotating cars out after 60 days or much less, leaving no way to ticket this behavior.

In a statement, Todd said, “I regret there is confusion about the purpose of legislation I introduced yesterday. I remain in full support of car sharing and the benefit it brings to our city. However, carsharing companies operating illegally are taking advantage of a loophole in the ROSA law resulting in long-term car storage on un-zoned residential streets.”

Getaround raises additional concerns

Another car-sharing issue concerns Getaround, relating to issues which Street Justice’s Gordon Chaffin reported. Chaffin wrote that MPD Sergeant Matthew Grabowski told Advisory Neighborhood Commission 4B that “the police believe assailants are using the map of available cars to find easy targets. Once a user downloads the app and completes a short security check, they have access to a map of cars available for immediate rental. … Those offenders will break into the car, unlock it, and drive it away using the keys left inside for Getaround users.”

Chaffin also wrote that “Getaround is not licensed to operate as a car-sharing service in Washington, DC. The company does not collect sales taxes applied to car rentals, according to customer receipts obtained by Street Justice. Getaround does not have a business license in DC,” unlike “Zipcar, Car2Go, PenskeDash, Enterprise Rent-a-Car, and the now-defunct Maven.”

Reader Paul Lewis, who works for the Eno Center of Transportation also wrote in with an interesting anecdote about Getaround (which, he emphasized, is just his personal experience and not based on any analysis). He rents from Getaround “about once every 6 weeks or so” and wrote,

After a while I noticed that I kept renting different cars from the same owner. One day when I went to rent one, I approached the vehicle and he was carrying a portable tire pump and doing some routine maintenance on the vehicle. I asked him about the various cars, and he said he owns about 40 vehicles that are rented out on Getaround 100% of the time in Columbia Heights. He also manages a fleet of another 40 vehicles for his cousin who lives in Park View. This appeared to be his full time job.

A few months later I had another encounter with someone that was running a similar sized fleet. Rentals are much cheaper than comparable companies like Zipcar. From my experience, a 6 hour weekend rental on Getaround costs less than $30, compared with at least $75 on Zipcar.

DC recently limited Airbnb rentals from people who, as a business, owned a large number of properties they were renting out. It seems some people are doing something similar with Getaround; whether that should be legal or not is potentially another matter for discussion.

What would Todd’s bill do?

Todd’s bill would simply make the ROSA law not apply to “a car-sharing motor vehicle,” defined as “any motor vehicle available to multiple users who are required to join a membership organization in order to reserve and use such a motor vehicle for which they are charged based on actual use as determined by time and/or mileage.”

I wonder if some services would simply argue they are not “a membership organization,” but the specific language can certainly change. Feldman said that this would mean, in effect, that if there were a car sharing service licensed in (say) Virginia, people using those cars wouldn’t be able to legally park them in DC at all, for any length of time. Or, if someone had a peer-to-peer vehicle in Silver Spring which was often used to rent for short trips to DC, that couldn’t be parked even briefly. He said they considered whether to allow a short window of time but decided against it, though the bill can change in committee.

Meanwhile, Feldman said, there is already a system for people to get ROSA exemption stickers if they have out-of-state cars they park in DC frequently. For instance, if a resident has a relative who lvies outside DC and visits often, DPW might send a warning or ticket from seeing the same car on the street overnight multiple times. The hypothetical Maryland peer-to-peer car sharing vehicle owner could get such a sticker, according to Feldman.

Todd had originally introduced his bill as “emergency” and “temporary” legislation as well as a permament law, but facing concerns from other councilmembers on March 3, withdrew the more immediate bills. Feldman said the councilmember still hopes to see a hearing and eventual passage of his permanent bill with the benefit of time for deliberation and for residents to understand what it is doing.

The bill already had a hearing scheduled, on March 23, but it was canceled due to coronavirus shutdowns. Whether this legislation will move forward quickly, or whether some of these less established car sharing companies will even be around if and when society returns to normal, will become clear in coming months.