Baltimore Skyline

(image credit, The Baltimore Sun ) The country's first all-electric car sharing fleet debuted yesterday in our city! How about that? Altcar's Maya 300s can go 120 miles on a single charge and 10 are available starting today at the Maryland Science Center. These first cars are designed for city driving only. The cars are only capable of going up to 35 MPH, which will be fine for most of the city streets in Baltimore, unless you feel like you want to speed down Northern Parkway or Orleans St. According to their website, Altcar hopes to add more cars to its fleet including highway capable hybrids in the near future. In addition to more cars, other locations with more cars will be operational around the city too. If you want to check one of these little green eco cars the Maryland Science Center will be giving free rides with admission through July. Check it out, let us know how it works! www.altcar.org A questions still remains. The Baltimore City Parking Authority put out a RFP ...

(image credit Baltimore City Parking Authority ) Carsharing is one step closer to being a reality in Baltimore after this week. The Parking Authority issued a Request for Proposals on May 1st for an organization to provide their services to the city. While this isn't as good as say the nonprofit idea BaltimoreCareshare, this is still great. Would Zipcar finally see that they are missing out on a great market here? Maybe even a small company interested in starting up a for-profit Baltimore based car share would be even better. Local company investing locally benefits all of us. For more here is the link to the RFP: http://www.ci.baltimore.md.us/government/parking/car_sharing.php Happy Post Cinco de Mayo Hump Day Only Two More Days to the Weekend Day!

As we reported on Baltimore Skyline back in October, the city is planning on it's own non-profit car sharing company, BaltimoreCarShare , to catch the market left by Zipcar, who did not want to enhance it's service in Baltimore Well apparently BaltimoreCarShare will start service in March. According to an article in the Sun , there will be a trial period in January and February, and then everything will be open at the end of March. No word yet on where car pods will be located, but that will probably be made public sometime in the future. If you ask me, they should definitely situate a lot of pods downtown, and at the public garages (Federal Hill and Fells Point to name two places). Penn Station, Camden Station, and BWI would also be key, to catch the commuters and visitors coming in town. Situating a few around the many college campuses (MICA, UB, Loyola, UMB, etc) would be great for letting students get around easier. As i mentioned in the previous post, the best idea would b...

Now since it seems that Zipcar won't expand it's market in Baltimore beyond Johns Hopkins University and Goucher College, Bmore is going to just go around Zipcar and create it's on car sharing organization. Take that! Seeing as Zipcar has been a great success in markets like Washington DC and Philadelphia, why wouldn't they want to start up more pods here? Especially in a city whose public and rapid transit system is far less suited for people looking to get around. Car sharing would be a great option here, and it definitely is a loss for Zipcar . On the good side of this is that Baltimore gets to create its own non-profit car sharing system on the lines of PhillyCarShare ( http://www.phillycarshare.org/ ). The start up date hasn't been set yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was something in the not-to-distant future. We definitely need another option here in Bmore , and this will fill a great void. Baltimore is a city where you need a car to get ...