The Federal Government Wants In On Car-Sharing, Too

The U.S. General Services Administration manages some 200,000 vehicles, cars used by federal government offices in cities around the country to attend meetings or visit communities. That's a massive transportation footprint (and a sizable budget item for the federal government). It may also represent a big opportunity to extend the reach of car-sharing.

In early-November, the GSA announced that it's looking for input from car-sharing vendors and industry experts on how it might broadly apply the concept to the government fleet. The GSA is primarily looking to save money by relying on car-sharing services instead of buying or leasing new vehicles.

"The second piece is that we think car-sharing will also help agencies realize that they don’t need as many cars as they already have and can then possibly reduce their current fleets," says Mafara Hobson, a spokeswoman for the GSA.

The GSA says it's open to all kinds of models: car-sharing fleets reserved for government employees, or fleets shared with the broader public. The administration may also consider deploying car-share systems to manage the disparate fleets already held by multiple agencies in a single city. Given that several car-share services are regional, the government could also wind up working with many vendors all over the country.

Currently, Hertz, Enterprise, and Zipcar have small contracts with individual federal offices. But as GSA scales up the idea, with pilot projects planned in several cities, it's also hoping to expand that list.

For now, the agency is soliciting responses to a "market research questionnaire" about how all of this might work. Some of the questions are:

Are there application fees?
If so, how do they work?
The Government would not be interested in paying an application fee for each potential driver - how can application fees be waived?
If they cannot be waived, how would you recommend they be established and centrally managed?

NAFA Fleet Management Association
125 Village Blvd., Suite 200
Princeton, NJ 08540

Telephone: 609.720.0882 Fax: 609.452.8004