Hip, urban car service might aid street workers
But some doubt Zipcars fit role
They are dispatched to the scenes of gang shootings and stabbings and just about anywhere that teenage angst threatens to erupt into violence. The city sends street workers to pressure points all over the city, but how they get there is now up for discussion.
If one city councilor has his way, street workers will soon be driving Zipcars. The car-sharing service that was once relegated to the environmentally conscious Cambridge crowd has increased dramatically in downtown Boston neighborhoods during the past year, and executives are planning expansions into Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan.
Councilor Paul J. Scapicchio met last week with a Zipcar executive and a city official who runs the street-worker program, and the councilor hopes to have a deal worked out soon.
Instead of taking the T or checking out a city vehicle, street workers could log onto the Internet, reserve a Zipcar, and buzz to a crisis scene in a
Some naysayers wonder whether the concept is in conflict with the very idea of being street workers, who, by definition, should be on the street, not driving.
"I would not want to see my staff toodling around town in Zipcars," said Sheila Moore of Bridge Over Troubled Waters Inc., an agency whose street workers target runaways and homeless youth.
"Our philosophy is our workers need to be on the streets and in the places where kids hang out, not in cars," she said.
It was an idea hatched over espresso and boccie ball in the North End, where Zipcar sponsored a volunteer fair last month. Scapicchio effused to the company's chief executive officer about the car-sharing concept, which allows members to rent vehicles by the hour and pick them up at locations throughout the city.
Zipcar now has 185 cars in metropolitan Boston. The executives told the councilor that some of the vehicles are not constantly used and that some car time could be donated to community causes. Scapicchio immediately arranged the street-worker meeting.
"I thought, 'Hey, there's an opportunity here,' " said Scapicchio, who is not a Zipcar member but plans to become one soon. "It would be wonderful if we could help the workers intervene."
While the details have yet to be determined, some of the city's 20 or so street workers could be given free Zipcar memberships, worth $50 to $75 a month, and the freedom to use the cars during off-hours, typically late at night or during business hours.
Robert Lewis Jr. -- head of the Boston Centers for Youth and Families, which runs the street-worker program -- declined to talk about the prospective plan, saying it was in the discussion stage.
"We haven't made a decision on anything," he said, adding that there are significant geographic hurdles to clear if the program were to work.
The nearest Zipcar to the street workers' headquarters in Roxbury is more than a half-mile away. There is one such car in Dorchester and none in Mattapan.
Company executives say Zipcar has been expanding in recent months and plans to put more cars in those neighborhoods.
It is something of a turning point for Cambridge-based Zipcar, its executives say. Since it was launched in 1999, the service has become more mainstream and less of a fad.
There are now 425 Zipcars in 21 cities in eight states, and the company became profitable for the first time last July.
New members are joining at the rate of 1,250 per month, executives say, and in metro Boston in the past year the company has added 53 more cars, and membership has doubled.
"Car-sharing four or five years ago was a nice thing to have, but now it's part of the transportation mix," said Matthew Malloy, Zipcar vice president of marketing. "It's at a point where there's so many cars around the neighborhood that they can rely on it, they can depend on it."
In a survey the company released yesterday, Zipcar says 43 percent of its members said they either junked their cars or didn't buy a car that they would have purchased if the car-sharing service were not available. Reducing the number of cars on the road is part of the company's commitment to community service, Malloy said, and so is the street-worker idea.
A Zipcar executive will soon tour the areas that street workers are focusing on now in East Boston, Dorchester, and Roxbury. Lewis will decide whether the program is right before dispatching workers to crisis scenes in the nearest Zipcar to headquarters, a Mazda3 sedan known as Marcy, with a lime-green Z logo emblazoned on the side.
For Scapicchio, he says it's just another public-private partnership, a staple of governance in the 21st century.
"It just makes so much sense," he said.
Donovan Slack can be reached at dslack@globe.com.
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.
