Cityhop New Zealand's first car share service – cars by the hour

Colloborative consumption is the fancy word for sharing! It’s what neighbours did in our great grandparents day. It’s what Cantabrians have been doing successfully  as a result of the earthquake.

As we have become more of a consumer society we’ve tended to buy all the gadgets we might need once a year and store them without thinking of asking our neighbour would they let us borrow theirs.

I know I’m guilty of it after I saw my neighbour use his water blaster I used my frequent shopper points to get one myself and I’m sure if I had asked I could have borrowed his.

Northern Western University profiles Chuck Templeton, founder of the new website, ohsowe.com in Chicago encourages  bartering, trading and sharing goods and services in local communities by bringing people into contact with neighbors who have what they need and live close by.

Chuck points out there are 60,000 drills in homes throughout the US used on average for 4 minutes every year. If we shared, he says, we wouldn’t need to manufacture the vast quantities still being made, we just need to provide access.  We could move from needing to own to sharing. (wow what an idea!)

Roo Rogers who wrote “What’s Mine is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption is Changing the Way We Live,” says,”Collaborative consumption is basically a very old, traditional behavior that has been put on steroids today and allows for mass coordination and efficiency.”

“In this analogy, steroids represent the Internet, a highly efficient tool for linking people to one another on a small-scale, neighborhood level. Websites such as ohsowe.com and others like it allow people to network in ways that haven’t been possible until quite recently. For instance, swap.com, a forum that allows users to trade their old goods for second-hand stuff they want

Even less tech-heavy models, such as car-sharing operations, wouldn’t have seemed so feasible several years ago.

Cityhop is NZ’s only car share company providing customers with shared, fuel efficient alternatives to car ownership. It takes an expensive individual asset and makes it available to lots of people via a membership scheme.

Many people can’t imagine not owning a car. Read here, how easy it is.

Kathy Harget of Baltimore went car-free  to have a “low-carbon life” that includes shopping at public markets for locally produced foods. She said about 75 percent of her local travel is by bike — For other trips, she takes the bus and uses a Zipcar two or three times a month.

Harget also has been saving a bundle on car payments, insurance, parking fees and maintenance. She tracked transportation costs rigorously for her first six months without a car and found that her spending had been cut by 50 percent

This sharing thing might just catch on.