Last Wednesday, the City of Knoxville announced the beginning of a new partnership with the company Zipcar, Inc., a car sharing network with thousands of vehicles in cities around the country.

Here’s how it works: you fill out an application and pay a one-time application fee. They do a background check on you, and if you are approved, you receive a “zipcard” in the mail. There is a yearly membership rate to keep the card. You can then reserve a car whenever you need it from the website or the smartphone app. After that, you can find your car in the specified location, unlock it with the zipcard, and you are on your way! It is such an awesome and simple idea; I wish I had thought of it.

In Knoxville, there are now four Zipcars: two downtown on Gay Street and two on UT’s campus across from the Student Aquatic Center. To rent a car the traditional way, a driver has to be 25 years old. But to be a Zipcar member students only need to be 18 years old, and the general population only has to be over 21.

There are many perks of car sharing over car ownership in a city. Owning a car anywhere is extremely expensive. Car payments, insurance, gas and maintenance are all incredibly expensive. And on top of that, in a city, parking is astronomical. On average, owning a car costs $715 per month, but it is only used generally for about an hour per day. But with Zipcar, you pay for what you use. In Knoxville the hourly rate is about $8, or you can rent the car for the full day at about $70. Insurance, gas, and 180 free miles are included with every rental.

To make it even cheaper, a grant to improve air quality from the Knoxville Regional Transportation Planning Organization has waived Zipcar’s one-time application fee and the first year membership fee. For people who do not need to use a car all the time, Zipcar really is the cheapest way to go.

Car sharing is also extremely beneficial to the environment, as city officials who secured this grant know. This growing trend diminished the global carbon dioxide emissions by 482,170 tons in 2009. For every shared car that enters the market, fifteen fewer owned cars are on the road. In 2009 for the first time the number of Americans who bought new cars was less than the number who got rid of their cars. Also, car sharing members tend to drive 31 percent less than when they own a vehicle.

I promise I don’t work for Zipcar. I just can’t get over how perfect and practical a solution this is for the modern problems of limited time, thin wallets and an even thinner ozone. The monetary impact is huge for your average city-dweller, and it provides such an easy way for people to help the environment while going about their regular lives. Members save time with the ability to access Zipcar services right from their phones and with reduced traffic congestion overall.

I passionately commend Mayor Madeline Rogero and the rest of the City of Knoxville for being so forward thinking and practical. Knoxville is really making an effort to make the city one of the most modern and happiest places to live and work in the U.S. With creative solutions like Zipcar within the city limits, we are certainly well on our way.

— Lindsay Lee is a junior in mathematics. She can be reached at [email protected].