Baby, You Can Drive My Car. And So Can He

8:25 A.M. The silver Honda Civic leaves Kevin Greenlee’s house and tools across Pleasanton, a fast-growing town 30 miles east of San Francisco. We’re headed for the local Bay Area Rapid Transit station, where Greenlee, 41, an investments manager, will park the car for the day. It will not be waiting for him when he returns. While he rides a San Francisco-bound commuter train, someone else will get in the car and drive away. After that, five more people will get behind the wheel and put close to 100 miles on the Honda. Greenlee doesn’t mind. “I just need a car,” he says, “to get to the BART station and back.”

Greenlee will drive home a different silver Honda this evening. His own car, a 1987 Ford Thunderbird, has sat unused in his garage for the past four months. During that time, Greenlee has shared 12 natural-gas Hondas with 60 strangers in an experiment called CarLink. The program is run by researchers at the University of California at Davis, who believe that car sharing can encourage mass-transit use while reducing pollution and traffic. It saves Greenlee money: he pays just $200 a month–covering insurance, fuel and maintenance–to have a Civic for himself at night and on weekends. Now he might get rid of the T-Bird.

8:45. Greenlee arrives at the station, leaves the key to the Honda in a security box and walks to his train. Soon Annemarie Meike and Bill Glassley, a married couple who live in Oakland and commute to Pleasanton, pick up the key and get into the Honda to drive to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where both are scientists. In the past they drove the entire way from home to their jobs–60 miles round-trip–because the bus service connecting BART to the lab was slow and unreliable. Now they take BART to Pleasanton and, for $60 a month, zip from the station to the lab in a CarLink Honda. They finish office tasks on the train and keep more sensible hours in order to get the Honda back to the BART station in time for a nighttime sharer. “This has eliminated a lot of the stress and anxiety of commuting,” Glassley says.

9:45. Glassley pulls into the lab and drives the car to a natural-gas pump. Drivers are responsible for filling the tank up, even though they may not drive the same car their next time out. There’s a lost-and-found for stuff left in the cars: sunglasses, cell phones, coffee mugs. (One guy forgot his baby’s car seat.) A website allows sharers at the lab to reserve cars for errand running (at 10[cents] a mile) and to arrange car pools back to the BART station at day’s end.

NOON. Glassley and Meike hop into the Honda–which is labeled with an F–to grab a fast lunch. I ask about the annoyance of the other drivers’ fiddling with the radio presets. “That’s turned out to be a great thing,” Meike says. “Every time I get into the car, I discover a new station.” While she talks, she dumps hot sauce onto a taco and feeds it to Glassley, taking care not to muss up the seat for the next driver.

2:30 P.M. I’m the next driver. No one needs car F, so I take it for a quick spin. According to Susan Shaheen, 32, the graduate student who runs CarLink, car-sharing organizations have flourished in Europe and Japan. Switzerland has 600 of them. This summer Seattle plans to launch a sharing program using 200 cars.

5:15. Sandy Mathews, 32, an environmental analyst at the lab, drives back to the BART station, picking up LeeAnne Mila, 32, on the way. I press them on the presets issue. Mila says it never comes up. Everyone listens to NPR.

5:50. Roy Florey, 44, gets off the BART train, returning from his job as a hospital auditor in Oakland. He climbs into car F for his trip home. His 17-year-old son just got a driver’s license, and car sharing saves Florey from having to buy another car.

6:20. Car F coasts into Florey’s driveway in Livermore. The communal bond the CarLinkers have formed strikes me as almost quaint. Florey admits he initially thought the car-sharing idea “sounded pretty weird.” But now he’s a believer. “At this point,” he says, “I would be happy to share all of my cars.”