
Robin Chase thinks about how to make transportation better – now and 50 years down the road
Robin Chase freely admits her first big idea was an import.
Her best friend’s youngest daughter had just come back from a trip to Germany – where she described in detail a shared car café. It wasn’t a new idea – not even in the United States – but Chase realized she could do it better, by incorporating emerging wireless technology. The proverbial light bulb went on, and Chase got to work:
“I struck when I could,” she recalls with a laugh.
Today, Robin Chase is considered one of the world’s foremost thinkers on transportation. She’s been named by Time Magazine as one of its 100 Most Influential People, and won the Massachusetts Governor’s Award for Entrepreneurial Spirit.
Her consulting firm, Meadow Networks, advises transportation and planning departments at city, state, and federal levels.
Now and then
But back then, she was another mother “thinking about doing a startup,” and looking around for the right idea.
She went on to found two companies, Zipcar and GoLoco, respectively, which give Americans access to transportation they might not otherwise find. Zipcar provides a platform for people to share cars; GoLoco, a platform to share rides.
Today, Zipcar is the largest car-sharing company in the world. Zipcar uses wireless technology to enable rental cars to emulate personal cars. Members have on-demand access to cars, which they rent by the hour. Charging by the hour encourages members to plan their trips and errands better – after all, a single trip to the grocery store, drycleaners and IKEA uses far less gas than three separate trips.
GoLoco is an online ridesharing community. Whereas Zipcar is more like a cooperative rental agency, GoLoco is more like Facebook. Members post planned “trips” such as to the airport and back, and others can join in. It handles online payments from passengers to drivers to share costs.
Chase got her entrepreneurial baptism with Zipcar. When inspiration struck, it struck hard, and Chase is still amazed at how obvious the idea seems in retrospect.
“I was that person,” she laughs, “I lived in the city with three kids, and my husband would take the car to work, which would sit unused and unusable (for us) in a parking lot miles away.”
Of course, there’s much more to launching a startup than stumbling across the right idea. As Chase freely admits, she wasn’t really prepared for what came next; the workload is staggering:
“There was no balance – I worked like a ‘50s dad,” Chase laughs, “I left at 8:00 am, arrived at 7:00 pm, and worked nights and weekends.”
“I’d come home and be like ‘where’s my pipe and slippers, and what’s for dinner?’”, she jokes.
Of course, her husband did far more than fetching slippers. In the first year, he became the primary caregiver to their children, and eventually came on board as the company’s Chief Financial Officer.
“He worked 20 hours per week in daylight, and another 20 after the kids went to bed,” says Chase.
In the early months and years, as she worked incredibly long hours, Chase gives full credit to her family for keeping her balanced and grounded:
“It must be an incredibly hard thing to try (launching a startup) without a family or beloved spouse – it’s so much work, with enormous disappointment and difficulty.”
“After a hard day or even week, you go home and they still love you,” says Chase, “you realize you have a great life there and (suddenly) that other part of your life doesn’t seem so bad.”
Ahead of the Curve
Chase realized the way to make Zipcar different – and better – than other car-sharing or rental companies was to embrace and make use of wireless technology.
To make it worth it to rent a car for a single hour, she reasoned, it must take a minute or less to reserve and return. From the business end, the cost of that transaction must be close to zero. The way to accomplish these two goals? The internet. This sounds obvious now, but nine years ago the world was a lower-tech place.
“We were cutting edge for 2000,” says Chase, “back then only 25 per cent of people had cell phones, and only 50 per cent had internet access at work.”
“That’s what made Zipcar different – technology enabled the hourly model. That’s what I saw and understood,” says Chase.
“Zipcar had to be as convenient as getting cash from an ATM,” says Chase with a smile, “I hope you like that metaphor…I spent three months coming up with it!”
From Zip to Go
Car sharing is wonderful, but has limitations. Specifically, it’s only feasible where people don’t need one to commute to work.
In sprawling, suburban cities – and there are plenty in North America – there are large numbers of people for whom car sharing doesn’t work.
That doesn’t mean they don’t have the same needs, or that owning a car is cheaper for them. As Chase points out:
“It costs about $25 per day to own and maintain a car – and takes up 18 per cent of the average US income – but nobody thinks of it like that.”
Once again, Chase turned to fast-rising new technology. In this case, social media. GoLoco is unabashedly modelled after Facebook and MySpace, and works almost exactly the same way.
What’s all the fuss?
Americans love their cars, so why is Chase trying to help reduce the numbers of cars on the road? A lot of reasons:
There are too many already. “In 2002, we had 1.1 cars per licensed driver in this country. With more people moving to large cities, we just can’t accommodate that many vehicles and the necessary parking.”
Demographics. “The population is aging – and older people do less driving.”
Projected costs. “Car ownership is already very expensive (see above) but it’s only going to go up – gasoline is projected to continue to increase in cost, perhaps to $5 per gallon.”
Planning. “It takes 5 to 15 years to build choices and options for people (in transportation). If we wait until a full-blown crisis, it will be far too late.”
Moving forward
Chase is a woman of many projects, and while she’s left Zipcar and GoLoco to successors, she’s keeping busy. She’s working on building an open platform for cars modelled on iPhone, where drivers can download useful applications at will.
She’s also working on a program that allows owners to control vehicle startup from afar. Besides vehicle theft, Chase says there’s an obvious utility that betrays the fact that she’s very much a mom:
“If you’ve got a 16-year-old daughter, the car doesn’t start for her after midnight unless she calls you.”
Sometimes, making the world better comes in very small steps indeed.