Arcata City Car Share

I am learning a lot as I go through this campaign. The one criticism I get is that I am fairly new to Arcata and "what do I know." What I know is that being new to the community allows me to bring a fresh perspective to Arcata and to bring creative and innovative ideas to Arcata that have already been in practice elsewhere. San Francisco, Santa Monica and Berkeley, and elsewhere, have many programs we should be looking at.

In San Francisco, residents and workers can check out cars from city garages to use when they need a car.This program has drastically reduced the amount of cars and pollution in the city. Arcata is perfect to do the same but better. Arcata's program would include residents, workers and students and an inventory of zero or near-zero emission cars and light trucks. With this program we would remove thousands of vehicles from our streets because people will ditch their cars as unnecessary and save on insurance, maintenance and car payments.

You need to go to Target in Eureka or a weekend trip home? You check out a car. You need to pick up furniture or a bed? You check out a light truck. People will get rid of their cars if they can rely on the City to provide them with one when they need it. Good for the environment every which way. This will become even more attractive to even more people in Arcata when we start over with public transportation and replace it with a free zero or near-emission public shuttle service running every five to ten minutes and accessible by text messaging, cell phones, computers or just simply flagging it down.