Council balks at car-sharing expansion
Action delayed as staff addresses concerns about parking spaces, transportation plan
A plan to allow more onstreet parking spaces for cars Houstonians could rent by the hour hit a bump last week, when City Council members balked at moving beyond the pilot program they approved nearly two years ago.
Expansion of the city’s carsharing program will wait at least another week as staff members address some of the concerns raised.
As devised, the program would allow Houston to enter into agreements with car-sharing companies, firms that allow via a smartphone app someone to check out a vehicle and then drive it — which usually requires a membership that comes with a monthly or annual fee. The car could then be left at any designated location, including returning it to the original spot.
Skeptical council members struggled at Wednesday’s meeting with the idea of reducing public parking or allowing a private company control over the spots.
“These parking spots belong to the city, and to give them to private companies for their use, it just doesn’t seem to make sense to me,” At-Large Councilman Michael Kubosh said.
Many of the council members’ stated worries, however, went beyond car sharing to the divide over transportation initiatives sought by Mayor Sylvester Turner and others.
Noting that many supporters
pointed to the success of car sharing in Boston and other metro areas, District A Councilwoman Brenda Stardig dismissed the comparison.
“This is Houston, Texas. We are a unique city,” Stardig said, noting the reliance local residents have on their automobiles.
“They have their cars and … they want their parking space in town when they want it,” she said.
The rhetoric drew a rebuke from Turner, who noted the city widened roads throughout the last three decades and only saw congestion increase.
“If we do things the way we have done it in the past, Houston will suffer,” Turner said.
He said the city simply must do everything in its power to encourage people to use mass transit and other means to decrease the number of vehicles traveling around the area, particularly solo car trips. Opposing change to favor what already has been done will not work, Turner said.
“The culture needs to change in this city,” Turner said. “Otherwise, we are going to get stuck and not be competitive and we are going to lose.”
Though Houston has seen modest gains in mobility options, such as car sharing and bicycling options, that progress has not come easily.
The most high-profile dispute was with transportation network companies such as Uber and Lyft, which launched in Houston without explicit regulations.
After a contentious fight, the city finally corralled the companies before losing all regulatory power to the state.
In a similar fashion, dockless bike-sharing companies sought to work with Houston to develop rules, unlike the rollout in Dallas that caught that city by surprise.
Now, Dallas is contending with a proliferation of thousands of bikes on city sidewalks, and Austin is developing rules for both dockless bikes and electric scooters that travelers can rent and use to zip across the downtown area.
Bikes, Zipcar program
Houston, meanwhile, after a council committee raised various questions, has stalled in its efforts to bring in dockless bikes. The B-Cycle program, however, in which bikes can be picked up and dropped at kiosks, remains popular.
The Houston area’s car sharing program lags other cities, such as Boston, where hundreds of pickup locations dot the region, and Denver, which worked out city regulations allowing companies to purchase on-street parking spaces or buy a placard allowing cars to be parked at any public spot within a specified area.
The Houston area has about two dozen spots where cars can be accessed from a handful of companies, but only one of those firms — Zipcar — has an onstreet location. The rest are located in private lots, such as Bush Intercontinental Airport and major universities in the area.
The companies have aggressively marketed to transit riders and others who would prefer not to own a vehicle in dense urban areas, while maintaining the ability to grab a car when they need it.
Zipcar leases four spots in Midtown as part of a pilot with the city that started in January 2017. Typically, the company keeps a variety of cars in the downtown area, including “Polar Bear,” a Nissan pickup, and “Mayor Turner,” a Mazda 3 that on Thursday was parked in one of the on-street spots on Bagby and was available for $9 per hour or $74 for the entire day.
According to a city presentation on the program, membership in car-sharing programs has increased 3.9 percent since the on-street pilot began, with 16 percent of members giving up their automobiles.
Losing parking spaces
While supporters say more is needed to persuade increasing numbers of Houstonians to ditch their cars and choose transit, bicycles and shared cars to get around, skeptics question whether the benefits outweigh the costs in terms of lost parking spaces for vehicles that only a limited number of people can use.
Under the proposal, Houston could enter into master licenses with the various companies interested in on-street spaces, and designate which spaces could be used. As Zipcar does now, the companies would pay the city for use of the parking spaces on a monthly basis.
Owners of cars illegally parked in the designated spaces could face fines of up to $200, according to the proposal.
The potential for fines and the use of luxury cars such as BMWs and Maseratis by some car-sharing companies worried District I Councilman Robert Gallegos.
If companies could commit to energy-efficient vehicles and some portions of the proposal were altered, Gallegos said it could solve many concerns.
“We just need to sit down and figure this out so it is better for all Houstonians,” he said.