Positive article re: Car2Go in Austin

[rfernatt]

Car2Go Cheat Sheet Austin News - AustinChronicle.com

[forestacademy]

Yes another news story that will at most get 10 posts here and die. Only negative ones will get noticed.

[smartcar111]

It's a good article. Thank you for posting!

[Terry Stibal]

A very nice little review, with one glaring exception. While it won't matter to most of you, who will probably never darken the streets of the third city to function as our state capital, those reading the review in Austin might have welcomed a better description of just where those geographic limits on the Car To Go program were located.

[Watermelon]

Originally Posted by Terry Stibal

A very nice little review, with one glaring exception. While it won't matter to most of you, who will probably never darken the streets of the third city to function as our state capital, those reading the review in Austin might have welcomed a better description of just where those geographic limits on the Car To Go program were located.

According to the FAQ, it says you can drive as long as you'd like and as far as you'd like. Looks like they're spread out in the Austin area:
car2go: Operating area map

[Terry Stibal]

The cars may be spread out in reality, but the official operating area (as listed here: http://www.car2go.com/austin/en/file...ating_area.pdf) is (in Austin terms) very tightly restricted. The area shown barely gets you outside of "downtown" to the north, and only very slightly so to the south.

Austin, like most Texas cities, is a very big, spread out place. The metro area stretches from Round Rock TX to the north, and about ten miles to the south. East, the depth of Austin is not so great, but the western dimension includes a ton of development of which I am only vaguely aware.

The spotting of the cars on the "Operating area map" is probably cars in use, rather than where they are allowed to be dropped when not operating. If drop-offs were not so restricted, you'd have single cars spread out all over creation, with no "concentration" of the parked vehicles where they would be convenient to be picked up by the intended program subscribers.

When we picked up our GPS head unit at smart Center Round Rock, they had a large slug of the cars for the Car2Go program parked in their paddock. It was weird to see so many smarts parked in one place.

[Terry Stibal]

Nope. The cars on the map, after some experimenting with the quirky locator system, seem to be cars parked and ready (or, in some cases, not so ready) for action.

During my frustrating clicking on the map (it kept jumping off my computer screen to the north when returning to the map from examining a car's status), one car was taken out of available status. Most of the vehicles shown were concentrated in the area shown on the PDF map, with one located way to the north of Round Rock, most certainly not in the blue area on the map.

[Watermelon]

Yea, that part is certainly confusing. Maybe it's for the special parking?