The email landed at 3.03pm on December 1st. Emails are meant to ping or, more likely, slink silently into your inbox. I could have sworn this one landed with a thud.
It was from Zipcar, the car-sharing service used by 500,000 Londoners. “Important service announcement,” it said. The upshot of the announcement was that soon there would be no more service at all. Zipcar planned to quit London on New Year’s Eve.
Cue lashings of woe. A US multinational pulling its services out of a foreign capital wouldn’t normally warrant much of a reaction. But this announcement from Avis Budget (the car rental company that owns Zipcar) made me miserable for the rest of the day.
I do not own a car in London. Like many residents of the city, I have grown used to relying on Zipcar for short jaunts on those infrequent occasions when only your own set of wheels will do. It is by far the biggest car-sharing – or short term rental – service in London.
The Underground is a great service, but not if you’re lugging bulky items. I once brought a vacuum cleaner on to the Tube when moving house. The Northern Line can resemble a hellscape painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. But rarely has it seen an Irishman hauling a Nilfisk. Nowadays, I would make that trip in a Zipcar.
Zipcar’s hire-by-the-hour vehicles are also handy for the occasional “big shop” at a supermarket or for trips to Ikea in Croydon. They are parked all over the city, each with their own dedicated bays. Some Zipcars on the Flex service can be parked anywhere. Just open the app, look at the map, and walk to the nearest free car.
Every now and then I might use a Zipcar to bring my youngest daughter to an extracurricular class, or to a schoolfriend’s birthday party or for an outing to an area of the city badly serviced by the Tube – I never quite made peace with the bus service in London.
Choose a car on the app, unlock it with your iPhone and fetch the keys from the glove compartment. You don’t even have to put fuel in the car or pay congestion charges or Ulez (emission zone) fees. Those are all included in the price: roughly £10-£14 per hour.
Perhaps the most convenient part of the Zipcar service is its fleet of vans. Many people who move house or flat in London shift their belongings in one of its vehicles.
When we last moved house a year ago, the new property was unfurnished. We filled it with cheap second-hand gear from Facebook Marketplace. For weeks, our evening routine was to grab a Zipcar van and drive to Wandsworth, Putney, Dulwich, or Clapham Junction to pick up a random chair or table, mirror or sideboard.
Zipcar names its vehicles. You develop car-human relationships with the ones parked nearest your house. There is a Nissan called Jolene who lives in a bay 10-minutes down the road. She might be battered and scraped, but Jolene never let me down when I needed her. I’m begging of you: please don’t take my van.
If Jolene was booked out by someone else, a Vauxhall Corsa named Minnie who lived a few minutes further down the street was always another option. There is yet another Corsa parked near my house called Midwest – I never quite understood the name for that one.
I became familiar with locally parked vans such as Sokolik (a Polish mountain?) and Susan Pride Month (no idea). My favourite was a Citroen Dispatch cargo van called Bossman.
But all of these relationships are due to finish at the end of the month.
Despite the affection for the service among its users, and their recent outpouring of woe at its demise, Zipcar was bleeding boot-loads of money in London. The most recent set of accounts for the US company’s British arm showed an annual loss last year of £11.7 million.
[ Mark Paul: It may be the British Museum, but it’s the rest of the world’s clobberOpens in new window ]
On paper, London should have been a perfect city for Zipcar, with its relatively low levels of car ownership due to the city’s extensive public transport network. This was in the middle of a large population of tech-savvy younger people. Plus the likes of me.
Car-sharing is also meant to be a key plank of the transport strategy touted by London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan. But Zipcar had to negotiate individually with London’s 32 different boroughs, which all hold local responsibility for allocating parking bays, for example.
Also, the company said its London customer base was badly affected by the stratospheric cost of living in the city. Zipcar users are now hoping that another car-sharing service such as Enterprise Car Club or Co Wheels will step into the breach.
Even then, there will never be another Jolene for me. I shall miss her, dents and all.
