They are planning a kind of communal rental system for Philadelphia that will allow a single car to be used by multiple drivers every day. People who need the keys for just a couple of hours to get to a child's baseball game or meet a client for lunch or haul home a new microwave.
The efficiency, they hope, will result in fewer cars clogging streets and lungs.
The idea isn't original. (It grew out of an informal arrangement among some thrifty Swiss in 1947.) But it is still cutting-edge.
This meeting, after all, was held before An Inconvenient Truth, before the ozone hole grew big enough to swallow North America, and before any of the Doubletree Five knew how they would pay for the project that came to be known as Philly CarShare.
In the five years since that meeting, the nonprofit they founded has grown from a spindly legged foal of an idea to a racehorse of a business, generating $10 million a year. The revenue pays for a small staff, the purchase and maintenance of the fleet, expansion and, when possible, a reduction in rates.
This month, the 30,000th member signed on, making Philly CarShare one of the most successful, fastest-growing programs of its kind in this country.
The five founders did it by digging into their own savings. They applied for a grant, flew to California to see how San Francisco ran its program, wrote up a membership contract, installed a software program, leased a Prius and a Toyota station wagon, and - on Nov. 7, 2002 - opened for business.
Seaman quit her job with the Center City District and became full-time manager of the project, unpaid for half a year. Robinson balanced the books. Shaeffer washed the cars. Lane oversaw marketing.
"In this region, one million people get to work without a car," Lane says. Not always by choice, he notes. Car ownership, duh, is expensive. Once you own one, it's only rational to drive it. You've already sunk money into the purchase, tax, tags and insurance.
