Zip Car vs. I-Go
Sorry, yet another car thread.
From time to time I need use of a small pickup truck (like today would be really nice) for rehabbing and landscaping needs.
Looks like Zip-car has a pickup at Milwaukee/Western/Armitage, and I-Go at Chicago and Damen, which are roughly equidistant.
My main question-- there are very few of this type of vehicle available from either agency, and it's really the only reason I would sign up-- are the vehicles you want generally available when you need them? Or are there frequent times when everything is checked out?
Also-- Yelp has a few reviews suggesting the I-Go experience has really tanked over the last year-- have people found this?
Thanks.
(And please no obligatory mention of the trucks at Home Depot or Menard's-- you can't use them unless you currently have car insurance.)
Views: 3047
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Anne Alt on
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Keep pelting I-Go and Zipcar with requests to add a location near you with a vehicle type that would be useful to you. I and a few others kept doing it with I-Go and finally got our location. It finally got popular enough that we now have a 2nd location in the neighborhood. Demand keeps growing, so maybe we can get a 3rd car before long.
It doesn't cost anything to keep sending those emails. If you're not doing it already, now's a good time to start.
h' said:Great sentiment. The first car-sharing concern that places a cargo vehicle (truck/van) within 2 miles of my home gets my membership for life. I can always opt for neither if they're only interested in serving certain parts of town.
Jeff K said:Go local!! I-Go is local and non-profit.
You can always defect if you don't like the service. But I always give preference to the home-grown option.
PS
I have used both I-Go and Zipcar and I was happy with both.
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Permalink Reply by h' Zerocats on
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"Case closed"- Eh, whatever. They need to provide something that's useful to me if I'm going to choose them.
For several years I would tell them (I-Go) that car sharing would only be useful to me if there were cargo vehicles of some sort, and they would vehemently argue that there would be no demand for trucks or vans. Zip Car finally forced their hand on the trucks. I would absolutely prioritize non-profit over for-profit if possible, but not to make a choice that's of little use to me.
Greg Borzo said:Case closed.
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Would be happy for any specific contacts. Im my contacts with Zip-Car the personnel tend to just sort of stammer when you ask them for something they don't have, and it doesn't occur to them to offer to pass it up the chain. My experience with I-Go is not as recent but was always of the "no, you're wrong, you don't want that" nature.
Anne Alt said:Keep pelting I-Go and Zipcar with requests to add a location near you with a vehicle type that would be useful to you. I and a few others kept doing it with I-Go and finally got our location. It finally got popular enough that we now have a 2nd location in the neighborhood. Demand keeps growing, so maybe we can get a 3rd car before long.
It doesn't cost anything to keep sending those emails. If you're not doing it already, now's a good time to start.
h' said:Great sentiment. The first car-sharing concern that places a cargo vehicle (truck/van) within 2 miles of my home gets my membership for life. I can always opt for neither if they're only interested in serving certain parts of town.
Jeff K said:Go local!! I-Go is local and non-profit.
You can always defect if you don't like the service. But I always give preference to the home-grown option.
PS
I have used both I-Go and Zipcar and I was happy with both.
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Permalink Reply by Ken Lee on
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I'm a I-Go member and I'm pretty happy with the availability of vehicles. I have used both the Lincoln Square Element and Tundra in addition to hybrid sedans - they are very handy vehicles. I chose I-Go over Zipcar because they are green as can be. Having said that, their car maintenance and upkeep could be better but I'm pretty forgiving of a local non-profit. Go I-Go!
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I'm in contact with someone from I-Go. If anyone else would be interested in a cargo vehicle in western 60608/eastern 60623 please let me know. No response from Zip Car.
h' said:Would be happy for any specific contacts. Im my contacts with Zip-Car the personnel tend to just sort of stammer when you ask them for something they don't have, and it doesn't occur to them to offer to pass it up the chain. My experience with I-Go is not as recent but was always of the "no, you're wrong, you don't want that" nature.
Anne Alt said:Keep pelting I-Go and Zipcar with requests to add a location near you with a vehicle type that would be useful to you. I and a few others kept doing it with I-Go and finally got our location. It finally got popular enough that we now have a 2nd location in the neighborhood. Demand keeps growing, so maybe we can get a 3rd car before long.
It doesn't cost anything to keep sending those emails. If you're not doing it already, now's a good time to start.
h' said:Great sentiment. The first car-sharing concern that places a cargo vehicle (truck/van) within 2 miles of my home gets my membership for life. I can always opt for neither if they're only interested in serving certain parts of town.
Jeff K said:Go local!! I-Go is local and non-profit.
You can always defect if you don't like the service. But I always give preference to the home-grown option.
PS
I have used both I-Go and Zipcar and I was happy with both.
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Follow-up: after making a bunch of noise about wanting to place a vehicle near me, me scouting out an appropriate location, passing along others' info that said they would use a car in that location . . . my contact at I-Go seems to be disappeared permanently.
Final (?) tally:
Zip Car: 0 (no response at all)i-Go: -1 for wasting my time with zero results and dropped communication.
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Permalink Reply by Thunder Snow on
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Car sharing makes the most sense in high density neighborhoods, with many nearby apartment dwellers who are car-free. Lakeshore north side neighborhoods like Lakeview, Edgewater, Uptown & Rogers Park fit the bill, or areas like Wicker Park, Bucktown the Loop or Logan Square, as do university areas like Hyde Park & Evanston (which have many car-free students nearby). A car-share parked in a low density residential neighborhood, or a neighborhood without many car-free residents, which may not get used for days between members, makes less economic/usability sense to a car-share organization, than a car in a high density area, that may get used 18-20 hours each day by a half dozen different members.
I-Go, being an ideologically-driven nonprofit (as opposed to Zipcar, which is strictly a for-profit venture) is a little more proactive in experimentally placing cars in somewhat unlikely places like Berwyn, Skokie or Beverly. To me, these areas don't fit the density or car-free requirement, and I'd be interested to know if they get much use. I know the I-Go that was parked at the Wilmette Linden Street L station last year finally got yanked for lack of usage.
And by and large, Chicago's south and west sides are still neglected and underserved by most services, not just car-sharing.
Car-shares for I-Go & Zipcar often tend to be located near L stops. I think for you, living outside the trendy high density areas of the city, car-sharing is probably a CTA ride or bike ride away, rather than a walk to the corner.
In my area of Evanston, with a huge car-free student population, I've got 3 I-Go cars and 4 Zipcars within a 2-block walk, but I bicycle or take the L to car-shares if I need something specific: such as, for hauling furniture or a larger vehicle for many passengers, a type that I can't find in my own neighborhood. There's a Prius parked in (naturally) the nearby Whole Foods parking lot which is useful if you bought too many groceries to easily carry home; the $3.50 for the 30 minute trip home and back is cheaper and faster than calling a taxi.
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Permalink Reply by David on
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Thunder Snow said:
Car sharing makes the most sense in high density neighborhoods, with many nearby apartment dwellers who are car-free.
Well, that and a relatively high level of disposable income. There's lots of places with higher car-free population density than Evanston, but it's the high wealth levels in Evanston that give you so many car share options (not to mention the Whole Foods). I-go may be experimenting with cars in Skokie, but they aren't experimenting in Washington Park.
I-Go is non-profit, but they still need to meet a payroll and their vehicle distribution seems to follow pretty much the exact same economic criteria as ZipCar.
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I-Go is now in Berwyn, South Shore, Beverly and Pilsen - not all high density areas, not all affluent.
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You're right, folks in Washington Park who are car-free probably can't afford car sharing, even at $6 or $7 an hour, which is likely why both organizations haven't yet put cars in that neighborhood. I-Go's ideological underpinnings are found in the types of cars they use (all hybrids or pure electric) vs. Zipcar's tendency toward fancier show cars like Mini convertibles and Saabs, which may not get the gas mileage of a hybrid. And I think I-Go at least tries to put cars in more unlikely areas than Zipcar, like the aforementioned Beverly, Skokie, Berwyn, Bronzeville and so on. At the same time, they both compete for market share and often copy each other's locations, in the same way a Trader Joe's is often near another grocery store.
For me, the attraction is the computerized convenience of car sharing vs. traditional car rental. I can book a car share on a moment's notice with nothing more than my cell phone, as opposed to filling out paperwork for a half hour at Hertz or Enterprise. And I can grab or return car share vehicles at off hours, not just when a rental office is open. Add that to the short rental times I can get with car sharing--down to a half hour, if need be--and car sharing serves a very good purpose for me. The downside, of course, is that car shares are always round trip; you have to bring the car back to where you found it (unlike our upcoming bike share, where you can ride a bike from your neighborhood to the Loop and drop it off near your work).
David wrote:
Well, that and a relatively high level of disposable income. There's lots of places with higher car-free population density than Evanston, but it's the high wealth levels in Evanston that give you so many car share options (not to mention the Whole Foods). I-go may be experimenting with cars in Skokie, but they aren't experimenting in Washington Park.
I-Go is non-profit, but they still need to meet a payroll and their vehicle distribution seems to follow pretty much the exact same economic criteria as ZipCar.
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Not sure if this is in response to my situation, but I live in the =most= densely populated part of Chicago per census bureau data going back 3 decades, and I'd venture to say that percentage of households without cars may be among the highest in the city. And the I-Go rep said they'd been looking to place a car here for a while.
Thunder Snow said:Car sharing makes the most sense in high density neighborhoods, with many nearby apartment dwellers who are car-free. Lakeshore north side neighborhoods like Lakeview, Edgewater, Uptown & Rogers Park fit the bill, or areas like Wicker Park, Bucktown the Loop or Logan Square, as do university areas like Hyde Park & Evanston (which have many car-free students nearby). A car-share parked in a low density residential neighborhood, or a neighborhood without many car-free residents, which may not get used for days between members, makes less economic/usability sense to a car-share organization, than a car in a high density area, that may get used 18-20 hours each day by a half dozen different members. taxi.
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I stand corrected, h'. I don't know exactly where you live, only that it's somewhere on the Southwest Side. I've never lived anywhere on the South or Southwest Sides and am pretty ignorant of what's around there. I ride the Green Line to the University of Chicago regularly and the areas I pass through have huge swaths of nothingness for blocks and blocks, likely remnants of the 1968 riots. I've always thought the Southwest Side was mostly rows of bungalows and 2-flats, as that's what I've seen in Bridgeport. And I would have thought areas like the Sheridan Road highrises on the North Side would have the city's highest population density. Live and learn.
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