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Shad and Shared Cars By Tim Zink Bay Journal News For about 30 days after I file my taxes, I get really sick. Once the nausea subsides, I’m left with a fever. But unlike the hay fever that starts nagging about the same time, this affliction is quite pleasant. The symptoms include bursts of energy coupled with a strong urge to be outside. This isn’t your run-of-the mill spring fever. The cause runs deeper, lurking beneath the surface – not of the skin, but of the Potomac River. This particular sickness traces to shad, the run of which temporarily invigorates the Nation’s River, turning a normally unremarkable fishery into lightning. For anglers, the shad run is salvation. It’s a surreal scenario: On the heels of winter, the Potomac, only a generation ago too polluted to touch, teems with migratory fish — not just shad in both flavors, hickory and American, but stripers too, both schoolies and cows. They can be caught inside District of Columbia lines from the bank, while wading, or from a rustic rowboat. There are evenings when it doesn’t matter how you choose to fish, you are going to get a strike on most every cast so long as you’re tossing something into the water. Because of this, shad fever can drive a man to crazy feats, especially when he needs a way to drive himself to shad. Case in point: A couple of years ago, after assuring myself I had quelled the affliction sufficiently to go a couple of days without fishing, I parked my car in the commuter lot and hopped Metro to work. By two o’clock, I could think of nothing but being on the banks of the Potomac that evening. The problem was that I would lose almost all the daylight fetching my car and driving back to the river. The solution seemed obvious: rental car. Without a ton of available funds, I opted for the $30, super-subcompact, and was “rewarded” for my frugality with a lavender Chevrolet Aveo, whose pink neon pinstripes haunt me still. Ultimately, the glorified golf cart got me where I needed to be, but it cost me a complete subjugation of ego and any sense of style. Recently, when I stood in the same spot on the river and remembered the Aveo, I was struck by how much easier it had become to get there. The difference was Zipcar. Zipcar, and its competitor Flexcar, are revolutionizing city life – while facilitating my fishing habit. They are shared car programs. After enrolling and paying a reasonable annual fee, you can call or go online at any time and rent by the hour as much car as you need. If you want to drive a truck one day and a Mini the next, you can, they’ve got both. Zipcar has dedicated parking spaces and where I live, that’s huge, because driving has one big downside: tight parking. Here, the time it takes to find a spot frequently is expressed in fractions of hours rather than in minutes. You can rent spaces, of course, but they’re pricey. So is insurance. Then there’s gas. Gas and insurance are included in Zipcar’s hourly rate, which averages about $10. The fact that five of Zipcar’s parking spaces are within a quarter mile of my flat, and a dozen are within a mile, makes it even easier, especially on a day like this, when the shad fever struck suddenly. To feed it, I had only to go online, and click a couple of times. Ten minutes later I was in a zippy Mazda pointed toward the Potomac Gorge at Chain Bridge. When I moved from the suburbs into the city, I parked my car in a friend’s driveway. My plan was to walk and ride Metro to save some money to buy a new car. But adding Zipcar to the equation has kept my car parked at my friend’s place. The need for a new car has evaporated. I know four other folks either selling their cars or not buying new ones because of the car sharing option. There are multiple resource conservation benefits that go with these decisions, leading me to believe that shared cars are an idea whose time has come, and whose spread is imminent. It is in built-up areas like the mid-Atlantic where the programs have the most potential, and where they can make the biggest positive difference. My hope is that in coming years the car sharing concept will reach more communities that share my shad fever, from Fredericksburg, Virginia to Lambertville, New Jersey to Easton, Pennsylvania. If car sharing programs can make it in smaller cities and towns like these, it could signal a phenomenon as remarkable as the shad run itself. Tim Zink is a contributing editor to the Bay Journal News Service. He lives too close to the National Zoo. |
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