"Low-Car Diet Challenge"

Excerpts from "What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption" by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers

The power of Collaborative Consumption to change behavior and for that behavior to stick is illustrated by the “Low-Car Diet Challenge” experiment, a marketing campaign conducted by Zipcar, the world’s largest car-sharing service. Zipcar members can reserve a car twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week on the Internet, by using an iPhone app, or by phone for periods as short as one hour in any of the forty-nine U.S. cities it operates in, as well as Vancouver, Toronto, and London. On July 15, 2009, 250 participants from thirteen cities around the world—many of them self-confessed “car addicts” and so-called car-sharing “rookies”—committed their keys and their consciences to not using their own vehicle for a month. Instead, they utilized public transportation, walked and biked, and resorted to a car (they were given a Zipcar membership) only when necessary.6 The survey conducted after the challenge showed that living without a car had a positive impact on participants’ wallets, bodies, and communities. They increased their usage of public transportation by 98 percent, reduced their vehicle miles traveled by 66 percent, and on average saved 67 percent on vehicle-related costs. The miles they walked increased by 93 percent, and the miles they biked by more than 132 percent. All the extra exercise resulted in weight loss for 47 percent of participants; a total of 413 pounds was lost during the month, on average a pound or two per person. But the most relevant result of the experiment is that 61 percent indicated that they planned to continue to live without an exclusively owned car, and another 31 percent were considering that same commitment.7 In just one month, alternative travel became a habit. One hundred people out of the 250 were resolute that they did not want their keys back. The car addicts had lost the urge to own. And as we shall show, once people dip a toe into one part of Collaborative Consumption, such as clothing swapping or car sharing, other behaviors gradually start to change, too.