Despite the extent to which I talk and think about car sharing and other newly possible. web-enabled modes of transportation, the truth is I still don’t use too many of them on a regular basis. Need to work on that.
It seems as though I need to travel to SF to get the urge to get around town in new ways. A few months ago, I tried out Scoot’s new battery-powered short-term scooter rental service, which was really fun (and will get much better as battery life improves).
This week, I tried a new one: FlightCar. FlightCar is a peer-to-peer car sharing service, not unlike RelayRides, Getaround, or Buzzcar. The twist is that it’s all based around airport trips. Here’s the idea:
Every day, thousands of people drive to their local airport and park their car in long term parking before they head out of town. At the exact same time, thousands of people are arriving at that same airport — and guess what, lots of them need cars. Add a little web-based matchmaking, booking, and logistics, and there you go.
What I like about this approach is that it builds on behavior that people are doing anyway — dropping off and picking up cars at airports. It’s not a huge stretch to go from there to peer-to-peer renting, especially if the whole experience is really seamless. There is something about that arrangement that helps overcome the awkwardness that is a factor in lots of peer-to-peer businesses. Maybe airports is the perfect beachhead for entering the peer-to-peer car sharing business (or maybe not; we’ll see…).
My experience with FlightCar was pretty good. The online booking was really easy, just like renting a normal car, but with the added bonus of getting to pick out the exact car you’ll be driving (I chose a 1999 Audi A4 with a stick-shift — not a car you’re often likely to rent; my second choice was a mazda miata).
A FlightCar valet met me at the baggage claim (after a bit of wrangling since I was 2 hours early and we were waiting in the wrong place) - I dropped the valet and signed the paperwork, and then Brad, Albert and I set out on our way.
I gotta say, I actually liked it a lot — just like you feel more like a local when you stay in an Airbnb apartment, there is something different about driving a “real” car when you’re traveling. In this case, it’s a car I’ve always liked, and I don’t get a chance to drive stick that often, so it was definitely more fun than my typical rental.
FlightCar is still working out the kinks in the service, there are a few rough edges in the pick up / drop off experience that they’ re still working out, in this case the car wasn’t washed and was out of gas when I picked it up. The former will continue to improve I’m sure, and the latter was likely a function of my showing up early.
I feel like with all of these peer-to-peer services, there’s an initial hump you need to get over before you can participate at all. Something to get you past the “whoa that’s kind of weird” moment that many people have as their first reaction. Like Airbnb did with their “crash the inauguration” website around the 2009 inauguration.
In this case, I thought FlightCar did a good job of doing that for me.
It was about 10 degrees in Boston, and I was on the T on my way into Cambridge. And as we pulled in to Kenmore station the conductor notified us that all Green Line trains would be going out of service. So my train — and every train before us and after us — dumped all of its passengers out into the freezing cold to find another way to get wherever they were going.
There were a few shuttle buses, but they barely made a dent in moving the crowd. Every single taxi was full. After a few minutes, there were easily over a thousand people huddling outside in the freezing cold trying to figure out what to do.
I reached into my pocked and tried Hailo, but all taxis in the area were booked. Uber gave the same response — but on my second try I was able to snag an Uber car. So: five minutes later, I got a phone call and a black Lincoln pulled up next to me. I offered to share it w/ the group of people directly next to me, but no one was going my way. So I hopped in and was whisked away from an overcrowded frozen nightmare in a warm, comfortable car.
Totally made me feel like a superhero.
But not necessarily in a “save the world” way — more of a “wow I have a superpower” way.
Despite the extent to which I talk and think about car sharing and other newly possible. web-enabled modes of transportation, the truth is I still don’t use too many of them on a regular basis. Need to work on that.
It seems as though I need to travel to SF to get the urge to get around town in new ways. A few months ago, I tried out Scoot’s new battery-powered short-term scooter rental service, which was really fun (and will get much better as battery life improves).
This week, I tried a new one: FlightCar. FlightCar is a peer-to-peer car sharing service, not unlike RelayRides, Getaround, or Buzzcar. The twist is that it’s all based around airport trips. Here’s the idea:
Every day, thousands of people drive to their local airport and park their car in long term parking before they head out of town. At the exact same time, thousands of people are arriving at that same airport — and guess what, lots of them need cars. Add a little web-based matchmaking, booking, and logistics, and there you go.
What I like about this approach is that it builds on behavior that people are doing anyway — dropping off and picking up cars at airports. It’s not a huge stretch to go from there to peer-to-peer renting, especially if the whole experience is really seamless. There is something about that arrangement that helps overcome the awkwardness that is a factor in lots of peer-to-peer businesses. Maybe airports is the perfect beachhead for entering the peer-to-peer car sharing business (or maybe not; we’ll see…).
My experience with FlightCar was pretty good. The online booking was really easy, just like renting a normal car, but with the added bonus of getting to pick out the exact car you’ll be driving (I chose a 1999 Audi A4 with a stick-shift — not a car you’re often likely to rent; my second choice was a mazda miata).
A FlightCar valet met me at the baggage claim (after a bit of wrangling since I was 2 hours early and we were waiting in the wrong place) - I dropped the valet and signed the paperwork, and then Brad, Albert and I set out on our way.
I gotta say, I actually liked it a lot — just like you feel more like a local when you stay in an Airbnb apartment, there is something different about driving a “real” car when you’re traveling. In this case, it’s a car I’ve always liked, and I don’t get a chance to drive stick that often, so it was definitely more fun than my typical rental.
FlightCar is still working out the kinks in the service, there are a few rough edges in the pick up / drop off experience that they’ re still working out, in this case the car wasn’t washed and was out of gas when I picked it up. The former will continue to improve I’m sure, and the latter was likely a function of my showing up early.
I feel like with all of these peer-to-peer services, there’s an initial hump you need to get over before you can participate at all. Something to get you past the “whoa that’s kind of weird” moment that many people have as their first reaction. Like Airbnb did with their “crash the inauguration” website around the 2009 inauguration.
In this case, I thought FlightCar did a good job of doing that for me.
It was about 10 degrees in Boston, and I was on the T on my way into Cambridge. And as we pulled in to Kenmore station the conductor notified us that all Green Line trains would be going out of service. So my train — and every train before us and after us — dumped all of its passengers out into the freezing cold to find another way to get wherever they were going.
There were a few shuttle buses, but they barely made a dent in moving the crowd. Every single taxi was full. After a few minutes, there were easily over a thousand people huddling outside in the freezing cold trying to figure out what to do.
I reached into my pocked and tried Hailo, but all taxis in the area were booked. Uber gave the same response — but on my second try I was able to snag an Uber car. So: five minutes later, I got a phone call and a black Lincoln pulled up next to me. I offered to share it w/ the group of people directly next to me, but no one was going my way. So I hopped in and was whisked away from an overcrowded frozen nightmare in a warm, comfortable car.
Totally made me feel like a superhero.
But not necessarily in a “save the world” way — more of a “wow I have a superpower” way.
The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman
Investing @ USV. Student of cities and the internet.
The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman
Investing @ USV. Student of cities and the internet.
I’ve always loved Mozilla's mission and tactics - using awesome consumer products as the lever to make the web a better place to be. That’s why I’m happy to join their WebFWD accelerator program as a scout. That just means that I’m one of many folks who are on the lookout for products and companies that would be a good fit for the WebFWD program. WebFWD is a slightly different kind of accelerator — it’s not a full-court-press in-person bootcamp, and it doesn’t take an equity stake for participation. The idea is to give promising projects that advance the mozilla mission that extra boost they need to become real (or even more real). WebFWD recently graduated its second class, and has just welcomed its third. You can see the whole list of projects and companies in the WebFWD family here. Here’s to the continued development of products and businesses that promote openness, innovation & opportunity on the Web.
When I got to the Media Lab and told the story to Nate his (correct) reaction was: “well, a black car swooping in to rescue a white man is kind of the definition of privilege. Wouldn’t it be more amazing if there were a way for everyone to take advantage of the network of transportation options swirling around?”
Of course this is correct — while I was able to snag a ride out of the ether, there was still a huge market mismatch: thousands of people standing around looking for transportation, and hundreds of cars driving by with empty seats. Yet no way to connect them.
Ride sharing is not a new idea — there is no shortage of startups working on the idea — SideCar & Lyft for car rides, Weeelz for taxi rides, etc. — but it is something that is culturally and technically difficult to implement. Lyft got its start (I think) on college campuses, where sharing rides to events is a much more natural phenomenon.
In times of crisis we are more likely to stray from our normal behavior and try new things. NYC famously mandated taxi sharing for all trips into Manhattan during the 2003 blackout and again after Superstorm Sandy. Nate and I got to discussing if there wasn’t an opportunity to use yesterday’s class of crisis — a medium-sized but somewhat predictable one — as another “thin edge of the wedge" to make ride-sharing more of a mainstream networked activity.
For instance, I’d gladly sign up to be part of the “boston transportation crisis network” — as a driver or a passenger, and basically pre-volunteer to give rides to people when this kind of thing happens again. I would like to know the number of times per year when the green line breaks down at Kenmore on very cold days — I bet it’s a lot. So there would be a decent chance of predicting it and then giving folks in the network a little bit of advanced warning.
If you think about it, weird anomaly events are perfect for launching new, behavior-changing activities. It was during the inauguration of 2009 that Airbnb got its start — by giving people a chance to “crash the inauguration" by participating in peer-to-peer apartment renting. At the time, it was *way* outside the mainstream to do something like that. But the craziness of the event made it fine, and now it’s a regular thing to do all over the world and Airbnb is a billion dollar business.
My other favorite behavior-changing anomaly is snow. My favorite place in the world is NYC in a snowstorm. Everything changes. Instead of walking on the sidewalk and keeping to yourself, you walk in the middle of the street and talk to your neighbors as well as strangers. During the Washington DC Snowpocalype of 2010, there was a lot of peer-to-peer shoveling happening.
I wasn’t in NYC after Sandy, but I have to assume that there were similar kinds of networked behavior that were positive but would have been hard to imagine under normal circumstances.
Maybe the idea is that people become more open to networked / peer-to-peer solutions when our infrastructure fails us — because they have to be.
If you think about it that way — it’s a pretty profound idea. Not to be pessimistic, but in our current environment, many of our institutions are failing. And we will have to become comfortable with other ways of solving our big problems. Health, education, energy, transportation, etc.
So maybe there’s a launch lesson in here for folks building peer network businesses that rely on cultural change that’s difficult to achieve under normal circumstances. Think about the traditional infrastructure you’re replacing — and think about the moments or events when they are most apt to fail, giving people the most natural incentive to change their behavior in ways they wouldn’t otherwise.
And give people a chance to become superheroes.
I’ve always loved Mozilla's mission and tactics - using awesome consumer products as the lever to make the web a better place to be. That’s why I’m happy to join their WebFWD accelerator program as a scout. That just means that I’m one of many folks who are on the lookout for products and companies that would be a good fit for the WebFWD program. WebFWD is a slightly different kind of accelerator — it’s not a full-court-press in-person bootcamp, and it doesn’t take an equity stake for participation. The idea is to give promising projects that advance the mozilla mission that extra boost they need to become real (or even more real). WebFWD recently graduated its second class, and has just welcomed its third. You can see the whole list of projects and companies in the WebFWD family here. Here’s to the continued development of products and businesses that promote openness, innovation & opportunity on the Web.
When I got to the Media Lab and told the story to Nate his (correct) reaction was: “well, a black car swooping in to rescue a white man is kind of the definition of privilege. Wouldn’t it be more amazing if there were a way for everyone to take advantage of the network of transportation options swirling around?”
Of course this is correct — while I was able to snag a ride out of the ether, there was still a huge market mismatch: thousands of people standing around looking for transportation, and hundreds of cars driving by with empty seats. Yet no way to connect them.
Ride sharing is not a new idea — there is no shortage of startups working on the idea — SideCar & Lyft for car rides, Weeelz for taxi rides, etc. — but it is something that is culturally and technically difficult to implement. Lyft got its start (I think) on college campuses, where sharing rides to events is a much more natural phenomenon.
In times of crisis we are more likely to stray from our normal behavior and try new things. NYC famously mandated taxi sharing for all trips into Manhattan during the 2003 blackout and again after Superstorm Sandy. Nate and I got to discussing if there wasn’t an opportunity to use yesterday’s class of crisis — a medium-sized but somewhat predictable one — as another “thin edge of the wedge" to make ride-sharing more of a mainstream networked activity.
For instance, I’d gladly sign up to be part of the “boston transportation crisis network” — as a driver or a passenger, and basically pre-volunteer to give rides to people when this kind of thing happens again. I would like to know the number of times per year when the green line breaks down at Kenmore on very cold days — I bet it’s a lot. So there would be a decent chance of predicting it and then giving folks in the network a little bit of advanced warning.
If you think about it, weird anomaly events are perfect for launching new, behavior-changing activities. It was during the inauguration of 2009 that Airbnb got its start — by giving people a chance to “crash the inauguration" by participating in peer-to-peer apartment renting. At the time, it was *way* outside the mainstream to do something like that. But the craziness of the event made it fine, and now it’s a regular thing to do all over the world and Airbnb is a billion dollar business.
My other favorite behavior-changing anomaly is snow. My favorite place in the world is NYC in a snowstorm. Everything changes. Instead of walking on the sidewalk and keeping to yourself, you walk in the middle of the street and talk to your neighbors as well as strangers. During the Washington DC Snowpocalype of 2010, there was a lot of peer-to-peer shoveling happening.
I wasn’t in NYC after Sandy, but I have to assume that there were similar kinds of networked behavior that were positive but would have been hard to imagine under normal circumstances.
Maybe the idea is that people become more open to networked / peer-to-peer solutions when our infrastructure fails us — because they have to be.
If you think about it that way — it’s a pretty profound idea. Not to be pessimistic, but in our current environment, many of our institutions are failing. And we will have to become comfortable with other ways of solving our big problems. Health, education, energy, transportation, etc.
So maybe there’s a launch lesson in here for folks building peer network businesses that rely on cultural change that’s difficult to achieve under normal circumstances. Think about the traditional infrastructure you’re replacing — and think about the moments or events when they are most apt to fail, giving people the most natural incentive to change their behavior in ways they wouldn’t otherwise.
