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Business News Transportation

Following Zipcar’s Cincinnati expansion, car-sharing company acquired by Avis

Zipcar in Over-the-Rhine [Randy Simes]

Just 49 days after Zipcar announced that it would expand its services in Cincinnati, the car-sharing company announced that it had struck a deal to be purchased for $491.2 million by Avis.

The move by Avis, into the car-sharing sector, follows those of Enterprise and Hertz, and is seen as a critical evolutionary step for the traditional car rental company.

As the nation’s largest car-sharing company with more than 760,000 members, Zipcar offers its customers a way to move about urban environments without needing to own a car. Their slogan – “Wheels when you need them” – has increasingly hit home with young people that have been migrating back towards urban centers and ditching their cars.


A Zipcar on 12th Street in between Vine and Race Streets. Photograph by Randy Simes for UrbanCincy.

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), overall vehicle-miles traveled (VMT) have reached their lowest levels since 2003, and that per capita VMT to levels not seen since 1998.

Furthermore, the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute has found that teenagers are delaying the pursuit of getting their driver’s license with just 31 percent of 16-year-olds getting their driver’s license in 2008.

“By combining with Zipcar, we will significantly increase our growth potential, both in the United States and internationally, and will position our company to better serve a greater variety of consumer and commercial transportation needs,” said Ronald L. Nelson, Avis Budget Group chairman and chief executive officer. “We see car sharing as highly complementary to traditional car rental, with rapid growth potential and representing a scalable opportunity for us as a combined company.”

While car-sharing continues to see explosive growth locally and nationally, now estimated to be a $400 million industry, it is yet to be seen what the merger will mean to car-sharing customers wary of getting behind the wheel of a “traditional” car rental company.

Wrote Adam Richardson in the Harvard Business Review, “Any time an incumbent acquires a disruptor there are challenges, and in this case, they stem from the very core of Zipcar’s existence: how it has created a sense of community with its customers and how it has used technology to create a scalable user experience that its customers love.”

Naturally, Zipcar leadership expects bright days ahead with more cars at more locations, new service offerings, and similar levels of service.

“This is a major win for Zipsters around the world,” Zipcar management wrote in an e-mail distributed to its customers. “With the global footprint, backing, and talented leadership of Avis, we’re going to step on the gas.”

Car-sharing has been available in Cincinnati since 2011. Rates start at $8.50 per hour, and 11 cars are available at five different locations in the Central Business District, Over-the-Rhine, Clifton Heights and Corryville.

Categories
Up To Speed

Should the FRA allow Amtrak to use lighter passenger trains?

Should the FRA allow Amtrak to use lighter passenger trains?.

Amtrak has historically been mandated by Congress to do all sorts of things that it otherwise would not willingly do on its own (i.e. run long distance routes to nowhere), but they are currently working to get the FRA to remove a regulation that would reduce its costs for operations and expansion. More from Slate:

Amtrak is going to push to get the Federal Rail Administration to change the safety regulations that force its passenger trains to be much heavier than the ones used in Europe and Japan. Relief from this rules has three kinds of advantages. One is that lighter trains use less fuel and thus are cheaper to operate. A second is that lighter trains can accelerate faster, making trips shorter.

Categories
Business News Transportation

Nate Wessel aiming to change the way Cincinnati does maps

Maps are used in our everyday lives to help us navigate our cities, perform research, and visualize spatial data, but Nate Wessel has attempted to change the way Cincinnatians view such information.

In June 2011, Wessel started a modest Kickstarter campaign that would raise money to print a transit frequency map he had developed. Instead of using the typical approach to developing a bus system map, Wessel adjusted colors and line weights according to the frequency of service along each bus route.


Cincinnati Frequent Transit Map (Day Time). Image provided by Nate Wessel.

While he simplified the system map, he also added critical wayfinding information such as neighborhood business districts, parks, neighborhoods and natural landscape features.

“The maps used currently will put the 38X on the same visual level as the 17, but one runs three times a day in each direction, and the other runs almost 100 times a day in each direction,” Wessel explained. “In no way does the map indicate any more value for one over the other, but my map gives people an approximate idea of how long you’ll need to wait, in addition to how frequent the buses come and where they go.”

Wessel grew up in Northeast Ohio and said that his first experience with transit was biking a mile to an unmarked bus stop in Canton. Since then he has studied urban planning at the University of Cincinnati (UC) and worked with the U.S. Department of Transportation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

It was during his time at UC, when he realized something needed to change with the way transit information is visually presented.

“A friend of mine from China was basically saying that he felt trapped in his apartment, and didn’t know anything beyond campus and thought you could take transit, but didn’t know where it went,” recalled Wessel. “He lived in a transit-rich area, but many people like him didn’t know the correct routes to take to the right places, even easily accessible places like downtown.”


Hamilton County property values by square foot. Image provided by Nate Wessel.

The initial Kickstarter campaign raised far more money that Wessel was anticipated, and he was able to print and distribute 30,000 copies of his Cincinnati Transit Frequency Map. The map is now also featured on Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority’s (SORTA) website, but beyond that has not made significant inroads with regional transportation agencies.

Six months after Wessel distributed his new map, SORTA released a new regional transit map, for which they paid $20,000, that lacked the intuitive display and added information presented on the Cincinnati Transit Frequency Map.

While both SORTA and the Transit Authority of Northern Kentucky (TANK) were originally cooperative, and even contributed financially to the Kickstarter campaign, the follow-up, Wessel says, has been a bit disappointing.

Since the original release and distribution of the frequency map, Wessel has continued to improve upon it while also developing a separate night-time map, and one that focuses on center city transit service. To support those efforts, he launched a second Kickstarter campaign which funded the production of 20,000 additional maps in September 2012.

Wessel, however, has not limited himself solely to transit maps. He has released a number of maps this year that have highlighted property value data in Hamilton County, provided an exhaustive analysis of SORTA’s new transit plan, explained the theory of bus bunching, and is in the midst of an eight-part series critiquing the Cincinnati Streetcar project.

In the future he hopes to do a comprehensive map for bicycling to replace the existing one produced by the OKI Regional Council of Governments (OKI).

“In some way it’s a common interest in Cincinnati that I share with a lot of people that see the city not doing things as awesome as compared to other places, so I kind of want to do that with information about transit and cartography,” Wessel explained. “I also want people to make informed decisions about transit and planning in general, and I think that putting as much information out there in an attractive and useful manner helps.”

Nate Wessel was the winner of UrbanCincy’s first featured profile contest at the September 2012 URBANexchange. If you have a great idea we should know about, please contact the us at urbancincy@gmail.com. URBANexchange events are held on the first Wednesday of every month at the Moerlein Lager House.

Categories
Up To Speed

The Best Open Data Releases of 2012

The Best Open Data Releases of 2012.

The year 2012 is over. But it’s important to occasionally look back and see what we did well, and not so well, as a society over the last 12 months. One particular item that has become increasingly more significant in planning our cities is open data. From tracking crime in Philadelphia, bikeshare activity in Boston, transit usage in Atlanta, green roofs in Chicago, to rat sightings in New York City…open data has gone viral. More from The Atlantic on the top 10 open data releases of 2012:

Last year, Atlantic Cities named ten of its favorite metro datasets of 2011 from cities across North America, illustrating the breadth of what we might learn (regarding mosquito traps! misplaced vehicles! energy consumption!) in the still relatively young field of urban open data. For this year’s installment, we’re going one step further. Sure, raw data is great. But useful tools, maps and data visualizations built with said data are even better.

In this story, you’ll find our picks for 2012’s best open data releases from municipal vaults, with an emphasis on tools that can be used by anyone, not just developers and data geeks.

Categories
Arts & Entertainment Opinion

Afghan Whigs return to Cincinnati to ring in 2013, possibly end career

Cincinnati’s Afghan Whigs reunited in 2012 for a world tour that began with a dozen dates in Europe, Israel, Australia, and Canada, appearances at various summer festivals including Lollapalooza 2012 in Chicago, and ended with a fall tour of the United States. The band did not appear in Cincinnati until late in the tour, and by all accounts the band’s October 25 performance at Bogart’s was a dominating one, centered around material from 1993’s Gentlemen and 1996’s Black Love.

The New Year’s Eve show differed dramatically from their October appearance, with a 9-piece stage band and almost no overlap in the set list. A horn section and backing singers enabled faithful performances of songs from 1965, the Whigs’ final and most technically ambitious studio album. Although the band performed much material from 1965 elsewhere in 2012, the band largely skipped over these songs at the October 25 performance in anticipation of the special New Year’s Eve show.

The Afghan Whigs play at Bogart’s on New Year’s Eve. Photograph by Travis Estell for UrbanCincy.

The full instrumentation of the 1965 tracks and the three closing songs from Black Love, played in sequence during the encore, were the show’s highlights. Conspicuously absent were “Milez is Dead”, “Honkey’s Ladder”, “Debonair”, and a number of other well-known songs that in place of ballads and other scattered material could have avoided the lull that marred the midpoint of Monday night’s show. Further, the PA mix was completely different – the searing sizzle of the guitars heard in October was pulled back and at times obscured by muddiness coming up from the bass guitar or some other source.

Hanging like a cloud over Monday night’s show was the knowledge that it was probably the final live performance by the Afghan Whigs, ever. Singer Greg Dulli announced that possibility late in the evening, soon after asking for a show of hands from people who traveled to the show from outside of Cincinnati. With hundreds hands raised, Dulli paused for a moment as if he might start a natives vs. visitors shouting match resembling the Ohio vs. Kentucky shouting heard each year at the Riverfest fireworks.

Instead, he never called on Cincinnatians and let the uncomfortable silence speak for itself – a slap at the local radio stations, other media outlets, and local music fans who never supported the band in their heyday or during the 2012 reunion. Aside from CityBeat, no local media source made anything more than a casual mention of the 2012 tour, and with the demise of WOXY, The Afghan Whigs are heard today only on low-wattage WAIF and WNKU.

Anecdotally, I have not heard the Afghan Whigs even once in public – either at a bar or at a party – since moving back to Cincinnati in 2007. The band’s failure to become the Next Big Thing in the 1990s is discussed ad nauseam on seemingly every Internet discussion board and YouTube comment section, but the failure of Cincinnati to embrace them then or now is another. Neighboring cities like Cleveland and especially Detroit have always celebrated their native sons, but Cincinnati seems determined to ignore The Afghan Whigs as much as they do James Brown and the legacy of King Records.