If you join Dancing Rabbit, you won't need to own a car. Since the establishment of the Dancing Rabbit Vehicle Co-operative (drvc/index.php) last month, Dancing Rabbit residents, or anyone who lives near Dancing Rabbit, can share in the ownership, maintenance, and use of jointly owned automobiles.
Sharing cars can make a huge difference in the economic and environmental effects of transportation. When five, ten, or more people share a car, the ecological damage created from manufacturing cars is sharply reduced. In addition, the fixed costs of insurance, licensing, and maintenance are spread around widely. Nevertheless, people still have access to an automobile for business or pleasure when other forms of transportation can't be used.
The drvc/index.php currently owns one vehicle, a 1984 Chevrolet van, which we run off of biodiesel (a fuel we make at home from used fast food fryer oil) as well as standard diesel fuel. Car co-op members also have access to a large cargo trailer (known affectionately as "Sylvia" after Cecil's grandmother who donated the money to buy it) used for hauling wood, tools, building materials, equipment, horses, or anything else up to 6000 pounds. In the future members may also be able to drive the school bus donated to us by Chris Knight. While our van is great for hauling large amounts of materials and humans, we are also looking into purchasing a small, fuel-efficient vehicle as well.
All insurance, fuel, registration, and maintenance costs are handled by the drvc/index.php. This saves everyone lots of time, since we only have a fraction of the paperwork to deal with compared with having several private vehicles. In return, the six members of the co-op reimburse the drvc/index.php based on the number of miles they drive. This encourages ridesharing, since members can split costs when they share a trip. Since we are still a small group, we plan use of the van through informal discussion among ourselves. When we grow, we'll probably need a system of signing out vehicles to coordinate their use.
The car co-op is a great benefit for Dancing Rabbit members. It enables residents to have access to an automobile when they really need it, without having to pay all its costs even when they aren't using it. It saves money, time, and ecological resources. Since we intend to run all Dancing Rabbit vehicles on sustainable fuels and not on petroleum, it allows us to centralize the production and storage of these fuels so that each individual doesn't have to discover the joys of cooking up biodiesel for themselves. Finally, it furthers Dancing Rabbit's mission of being a model for social change by demonstrating a system of sharing automobiles that could be widely used in both urban and rural areas to reduce problems related to parking, traffic, pollution, and the emptying of American's wallets to pay for their costly private cars.
While Dancing Rabbit advocates walking, bicycling, horse-drawn carriages, or public transit as better means of transportation than automobiles, carsharing can fill the gap when these methods won't work. There are dozens of carsharing groups operating in Europe and several in Canada, but as far as we know the drvc/index.php is currently the only operating carsharing cooperative in the USA (others have existed in the past but are currently moribund or defunct). We'd love to help anyone who would like to form a carsharing group in their area, and we can give advice on how to form a corporate structure, get the proper insurance, select cars and set member fees, and many other aspects of carsharing. Feel free to get in touch with us if you have any carsharing questions. It might just be time to get rid of your private car!
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