Kaid Benfied’s well written article titled Wheels when I want’em ties into an experience that occurred recently. Greg Good, local Morgantown greenspace hero, who recently realized his volunteering activities were becoming overwhelming was relaxing on a hiking trip in Otter Creek, WV. As he left the woods to come back to town, he noticed a zipcar parked at the trail head from Washington, DC. The zipcar provided him with a sense of exhilaration that he shared with the Morgantown Bicycle Board mailing list that I manage. At first, I didn’t think much of it, though I did peruse the zipcar website, and even observed CMU down the road has a few zipcars on their campus. But at the Organizational Meeting of the new Morgantown Pedestrian Safety Board someone brought up the subject about car sharing programs which allowed Greg to interject his experience.   Car sharing was well received at the meeting.  Afterall, every car shared takes several other vehicles off the road.

Before I go further, did I mention Morgantown, WV now has both a Bicycle Board (BB) and a new Pedestrian Safety Board (PSB)? That’s pretty exciting news. Anyways, on with the story, I was on a mission at that meeting to act as a liason for the WVU Committee that I head up with the Bicycle Board. The point of the WVU Committee is to target objectives where the City and the University can work together to improve transportation in a sustainable fashion, and to close a deal whenever possible, hopefully quickly, because the congestion in this College town is becoming ridiculous. Obviously, some transportation solutions need to involve the collaboration of both the PSB and the BB. It was exciting when the PSB was enthusiastic about zipcars, because sometimes non-motorized solutions can actually involve reverse engineered thinking.

I could go on and tell the history of the MPO at their http://planttogether.org site, their interaction with Morgantown citizens about non-motorized planning, how they have to associate non-motorized improvements with roads, their plan to build more roads, their lack of Federal Funding, and the Service Fee that the County wants to pass, and how it won’t happen … shhhh .. but I’ll leave that for another day. The good news is that money invested in for profit programs like zipcar.com or non-profit programs like phillycarshare.org would be a much better solution when put together with walking/bicycling/transit .. heh, and the PRT .. in a town like Morgantown.

Kaid’s candid commentary presents an honest opinion about an approach that is beginning to blossom in my civic minded sustainability quest – I’ve already talked to a volunteer fundraiser expert who happens to sell used cars, about the potential of pursuing some type of grassroots endeavor. And the beauty of what he says is that although he has a love for cars, even from his teenage years, and although he would rather not be a bicycling advocate for a pretty interesting reason, he still has found that he can happily forgo the need to actually own a car (although he owns one) by utilizing a car share program.

The days of four car owner families, one person car commuters, and silly people sitting in lines endlessly idling their engines is coming to an end!