The Internet Ideology - From A as in Advertising to Z as in Zipcar by Massimo Moruzzi - HTML preview

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Zipcar

Car Sharing was born in Boston in the year 2000, when Zipcar was founded.

Zipcar received great press as an economic, social and environmental revolution. The company claims that for every shared car, 15 private cars are eliminated. [1]

However, in some cities, car sharing is being used to greenwash serious problems.

In Milan, Italy, for example, City Hall has been very shy about tackling the problem of the hundreds of thousands of cars that are routinely parked on sidewalks. Instead, they prefer to congratulate themselves and pose as the self-proclaimed "capital of sharing".

Many of these car sharing schemes are successful. But are they improving cities?

Oh, but one day they will all be electric. And one day they will all be self-driving. [2]

But nobody dares ask the real question: Are we sure that cars can be the solution?

There's an American city that is chocking full of shared cars, once yellow and, recently, more of them black, that are constantly on the move. Are we sure that New York is really the model we should be following? [3]


[1] Slee, Tom. What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy, Chapter 4.
[2] Sherwood-Jones, Brian. Destroying the City to Save the Robocar.
[3] Schneider, Todd. Analyzing 1.1 Billion NYC Taxi and Uber Trips, with a Vengeance.