No one could argue that Car2go CEO Olivier Reppert didn’t have some skin in the game during the Chicago launch of the point-to-point car-sharing service this morning in Pioneer Court. He stood motionless in the downtown plaza in front of one of the company’s pint-size Smart cars while young people from the Jesse White Tumblers gymnastics crew bounced off a trampoline, soared through the air Superman-style, and somersaulted over the vehicle and his head.
Alderman Brian Hopkins, whose ward includes parts of the near north and northwest sides, noted that while the pilot is an experiment, so was America’s postwar effort to switch to a transportation system based on near-universal universal private car ownership. “It didn’t work, and I think we can now declare that that experiment was a failure,” he said. Hopkins added that, contrary to fears about Car2go creating a parking crunch, a 2016 UC Berkeley study of some 10,000 Car2go members found that each shared car took up to 11 private vehicles off the road.
