A conversation with the founder of Zipcar
Robin Chase co-founded Zipcar, the world’s largest car share service, in Cambridge, MA in 2000. You can now share Zipcars in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, London, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Vancouver, Washington DC and at university campuses across the country. The last couple years she’s been working on GoLoco, which aims to do for ride sharing what Zipcar did for car sharing: to make it easy, efficient and commonplace to share car travel, split costs, and reduce emissions. Urban Omnibus recently teamed up with our friends at The Infrastructurist to ask Robin about everything from mesh networks to taxi stands to why the infrastructure we build determines our destiny. Make no mistake: she thinks BIG.
Zipcar was a very early application of wireless that wasn’t cell phones. I thought, “Wow, this is what the Internet was made for: sharing a scarce resource among many people. This is what wireless was made for: we can make transactions very easy for end users and brokering those transactions will cost us next to nothing.”
