Montgomery County shuts down car-sharing program
Montgomery County has ended its car-sharing program for county government workers, an initiative urged by County Executive Isaiah Leggett, as a way to reduce traffic and auto air pollution. Under the program, the county paid $1,100 a month per car to Enterprise for hybrid vehicles, which were then made available for county employees to check out by the hour.
A total of 30 cars were rented by the county, but records indicate that each was used less than an hour per month by employees during the initial months of the program, making the per hour cost of using each vehicle about $1,300.
The program was abandoned in April of this year after it was determined that buying and maintaining a hybrid car would have been several thousand dollars less per vehicle than renting from Enterprise. In fact, the county could just as easily have contracted with Zipcar, a popular hourly rental car service, for about $10 an hour.
By the time the program was abandoned in April, the county was down to paying for only seven cars, and usage had begun to pick up. But even so, the county had paid $33,954 for 1,600 hours of car usage, or $21 an hour, between January and late April.
Despite hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on vehicles that often were never used, Leggett didn’t consider the shuttered service a failure.
"It simply didn't do as well as it could have in terms of participation and usage," he said.
