A Borrower Or a Lender Be

when I lived randomly in a series of SF apartments with free garages, I was blissfully ignorant – happy in my constant state of not giving two shits about where to park. But that’s over now. Since moving from the Mission to the Western Addition a couple months back, my car-owning life has taken a serious turn for the worse. And that’s because these days I’m always thinking about parking. My new building is great and my neighbors all seem pretty cool. Simply put, the parking situation around here sucks. I’d get a permit, but the streets are so crowded I don’t think it’d change anything. And the street-sweeping schedule is straight-up bananas, meaning that if I want to keep a car in my life I have to get up early every morning to move it.

The thing is, I do want a car – and so does my girlfriend – mainly because she needs to haul camera equipment around for her job and we like to take weekend trips around California. So our solution has been to leave my car in the lot where she works, way across town, during the week and then pray to the slightly-kinder weekend parking gods that we find a spot back home Friday night.

In other words, my damn car is either parked or being parked.

I’m paying more than $400 a month ($200 per month to pay off the car, $125 for insurance, plus more for gas, parking, upkeep, etc.) for something I hardly ever use. Which sucks. So lately I’ve been thinking about getting rid of the thing and signing up for a car-share program. Would I really save money that way? And which service is best?

Upon doing a little research, I found out that the car-share game is changing. Five years ago there was a handful of options with the same format – paying a fee for the occasional use of a car. But now there are tons of different outfits. I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do, but here are five services, old and new, that I compared to help you decide if car sharing is right for you.