Sharing is Caring, Right?

Civic Innovation and Change ManagementCleanTech and Zero-Emission TransitionPublic Affairs and Regulatory Design

Oct 20

Written By Cityfi

“Sharing is caring” is a line I used so many times when my kids were younger because I wanted to instill this value in their minds. As they grew, I hoped this saying would remain with them, even on a subconscious level, and influence their actions. As this newsletter will suggest, it seems I wasn’t the only parent advocating for this ethos.

Brandon Pollak, a Senior Principal at Cityfi, interviewed Angelo Adams, President of Zipcar, about the future and benefits of shared mobility. Cityfi team members Kyle Ragan and Andrew Wishnia spent time together in Washington DC while visiting the MID and several other Cityfi clients who share overlapping values and complement each other. The Cityfi team recently concluded working with a cohort of cities applying for the latest round of SMART Grants, who coalesced around using a shared digital tool as the foundation of their individual and distinctive projects. We also provide a policy update on the Biden-Harris Administration’s announcement of seven regional hubs for hydrogen production and use. These hubs will consist of shared work between public and private entities to produce hydrogen in an environmentally friendly manner and use it in a way that benefits the region where the hub is located. Lastly, Chelsea Lawson, a Senior Associate at Cityfi, reflects on her experiences with the RFP and RFQ process made more pleasant with shared resources.

Thanks to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, shared trips for public transit appropriately receive the largest federal investment in our nation’s history. Similarly, rail investments receive the largest federal investment since the inception of Amtrak. Sharing in a mobility context helps create options to reduce trips, shift trips, improve trips, and negate emissions. If you would like to share your organization with us and explore potential collaboration, we would love to hear from you. We are only an email away at info@city.co. Enjoy the newsletter!

Angelo Adams Leads Zipcar into the Future

By Brandon Pollak

For the past year, Angelo Adams has been serving as the Head of Zipcar where he is launching the old school pioneer in shared mobility into its next phase of growth and transformation. I had the pleasure of sitting down with Angelo to discuss his vision, dynamics in cities, and how policy action is jumpstarting the electrification economy.

Zipcar is a pioneer in the sharing economy and for re-thinking sustainable and equitable ways for how people get around in cities. What is your vision for the future of car-sharing? 

For nearly 25 years, Zipcar has always envisioned a world where car-sharing outnumbers car ownership.  What started as a few cars in Cambridge, MA, has grown to over 12,000 vehicles worldwide. Providing access over ownership is a business model Zipcar pioneered, before the iPhone was invented, and tech’s biggest issue was Y2K. Since then, several other categories have launched and have been referred to as the “Zipcar of” designer clothing, real estate, power tools, medical devices, home rentals, music – you name it.

As people seek convenient and affordable opportunities to access assets versus the high cost and hassles of ownership, we expect to see continued interest in car sharing. And, unlike competitors who have come and gone, we have found a variety of ways to enable smart growth and build a foundation for the future by constantly innovating in three key areas: 1) we obsess about perfecting the member experience, 2) we constantly work on our model for professional fleet management, and 3) we continue to strengthen our partnerships with cities across North America, some of which have endured more than two decades. These are all assets vehicle manufacturers, and other car-sharing providers (many of which no longer exist), including peer-to-peer companies, are trying to replicate. 

As cities face continued, albeit slow, population growth, congestion, and increased mobility solutions available on-demand, we are seeing increased interest in options other than car ownership and Zipcar plans to be an indispensable mode of transportation for city living.

How can that vision help bolster efforts by cities that are still trying to reinvent themselves post-pandemic and struggling to attract residents and businesses?

Zipcar shares a vision with cities and policymakers across the globe – that it is possible to live car-free or car-lite – to make lives easier, cities less congested, and the planet more sustainable. Cities nationwide are shifting towards sustainable and equitable transportation with aid from the federal government, and Zipcar provides an unparalleled transportation model with its professionally operated fleet to support this shift. 

As a founding member of SUMC, this year Zipcar joined public and private industry partners to advance the Shared Mobility 2030 Action Agenda so that equitable, low-carbon shared mobility will be more convenient, affordable, and accessible than owning a personal vehicle car in cities nationwide. Public and private partnerships that put equitable and sustainable transportation at the forefront – like New York City's "On-Street Carshare" program, Pittsburgh's "Move PGH" program, and Sacramento's "Our Community Car Share" program,” to name a few, are attractive to residents and businesses who are increasingly cost and climate-conscious. By reducing personal car ownership, we support ideas like the 15-minute city, which puts people (not cars) at the center of urban planning and is increasingly attractive to cities and their residents.

There are billions of dollars from the federal government and the private sector flowing in this transition to electric vehicles and the infrastructure that supports it. Where do you see Zipcar’s impact as it grows its EV fleet and generally on the evolving electrification economy? 

Environmental sustainability is a key benefit of the car-free and car-lite lifestyles Zipcar enables, especially with the increasing adoption of EVs.  Zipcar was the first car-sharing provider in the U.S. to introduce both electric and hybrid vehicles in its shared fleet, in 2022 we increased our eco-friendly fleet of hybrids by 10% and, throughout 2023, we have been expanding our EV fleet in select cities nationwide.

As we grow our EV fleet and draw our roadmap to electrification, we are engaging experts on EVs, public and private partners, and leveraging our relationship with our parent, Avis Budget Group, for scale and efficiency. As a result, we believe we are best positioned to bring high-quality, professionally maintained, shared fleets of professionally managed EVs to cities, campuses and business partners. However, to move forward with electrification, Zipcar is focused on four key elements of the constantly evolving electrification economy, including (and pardon the puns) electrifying city partnerships, empowering disadvantaged communities (which we’ll talk about next), driving innovation and supercharging member education.

Zipcar is teaming up with cities and the private sector to make electrified transportation available and accessible at convenient locations for urban residents.  A great example of this is the recent launch of the City of Sacramento’s “Green Tech Zero-Emission Mobility Hub.” This mobility hub is the first of its kind in California and will pave the way for 52 additional hubs that will provide Sacramento-area residents with electric vehicles powered by Zipcar, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, and a zero-emissions shuttle.

Check out the full interview with Angelo here

Meet Us in the MID

By Kyle Ragan

The DC Mobility Innovation District (the MID) was designed to develop innovative partnerships and test solutions that address the climate crisis, improve the safety of our streets, and create vibrant communities. In September, several members of the Cityfi team had the opportunity to convene in DC. As part of a series of meetings, Andrew Wishnia and Kyle Ragan met with Jeanette Shaw, Director of Government Affairs and Policy at Forth and Zack Baldwin, Associate Director of Mobility, Data and Research for the SWBID. Zack led us on a tour of the MID, using one of the on-demand Circuit vehicles, where we saw the tremendous growth and development that is taking place in SW and SE DC and discussed the innovative demonstration projects that the MID is leading. It was exciting to talk about how many of these projects intersect with Forth's goals and policy priorities of advancing equitable electrification. We look forward to continuing to work with the MID to implement impactful demonstration projects that help national leaders like Forth to advance equitable electrification across the country.

Collaborating on the SMART Grant

By Ryan Parzick

Cityfi had the privilege of working with a cohort of six cities on their applications for the second round of Stage 1 USDOT SMART Grants, which closed on October 10th. Each city submitted individual applications centered around the implementation of the Open Mobility Foundation’s Curb Data Specification (CDS) into projects that fit the specific needs and use cases of their city. The cohort of cities worked through a rapid six-week sprint from our initial kickoff meeting to the application deadline. Cityfi’s role was to organize the participating cities around this collaborative model, creating consistency in the cohort’s messaging while also providing different levels of assistance in the application process for each city.

Knowing that there would be a lot of moving parts to be addressed in a short amount of time, Cityfi devised a comprehensive plan for the entire cohort to submit applications promptly and in a manner that maximized each city's competitiveness of being selected as a grant recipient. This plan involved:

Establishing a collective infrastructure that was designed to encourage individual members to meet progress milestones punctually, while also providing the necessary flexibility for each city to operate within its resource constraints and address its specific needs in the most effective manner possible.
Providing subject matter expertise advisory services for each city to address specific concerns/questions and to provide insights into how each application matched the USDOT evaluation criteria and the cohort’s intent. We accomplished this through multiple iterative reviews and comments within draft documents and convening numerous strategy meetings with individual cities.
Offering weekly “Office Hours” for the cohort to collectively ask questions and provide insights. This time also allowed Cityfi to address cohort-wide issues that were best communicated in a group setting.
Creating both a set of cohort-wide problem statements to galvanize the applications around, and multiple common language pieces for cities to include explaining the collaborative nature of this cohort and the resources cities has access to as a group.

If the cities are selected for their grants, they will move forward together with the implementation of their project designs. Cohort building and nurturing, grant writing guidance and insight, and subject matter expertise around our practice areas are what Cityfi excels at. Have ideas on how we can work together, drop us a note at info@cityfi.co!

Biden-Harris Administration Awards $7 Billion for 7 Hydrogen Hubs Across the U.S.

By Mahreen Alam

The Biden-Harris administration has awarded $7 billion for the creation of seven regional hubs across the United States focused on hydrogen production and use. These hubs will consist of collaborations between various stakeholders consisting of private businesses, labor groups, researchers, and local governments, working on different approaches to hydrogen production and utilization. Hydrogen is viewed as a potential solution for combating climate change due to its clean-burning properties, releasing mainly water vapor when burned. However, the challenge lies in producing hydrogen without generating greenhouse gases. The grants aim to kickstart the clean hydrogen industry, with different regions, including the Gulf Coast, Mid-Atlantic, Appalachia, Midwest, Upper Midwest, Pacific Northwest, and California, being awarded funding. Notably, a large portion of the country represented by the proposed Southeastern Hydrogen Hub representing Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and the Carolinas were not included in the first round of awards - though this region’s efforts could still move forward with continued investments from some of the area stakeholders .

Congress allocated money for hydrogen hubs as part of the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and lawmakers’ approved tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act to promote low-emissions hydrogen production. As potential new applications for clean hydrogen advance through technological innovations, the U.S. Department of Energy anticipates cleaner hydrogen use to increase significantly by 2030. While the initiative has potential, there are concerns about the environmental impact and effectiveness of hydrogen use in various applications. While hydrogen is a zero emission fuel, the production processes have the potential to be major emitters depending on the fuel source used for the creation of the hydrogen. The success of these efforts hinges on how well the parameters of deployment are and to the extent to which we will realize the emission benefits.

Overall, the Biden administration's commitment to funding regional hydrogen hubs is a significant first step in advancing the hydrogen economy in the United States. However, the success of these efforts will depend on the parameters of deployment, technology choices, and the focus on environmentally sustainable hydrogen production.

Rounding Up Cityfi’s Impact Analyses

By Chelsea Lawson

At least half of our projects at Cityfi come out of a formal Request for Proposal (RFP) or Request for Qualification (RFQ) process. As many of our readers know from personal experience, this exercise can be laborious. And yet, like other forms of exercise, the exhaustion comes alongside gain.

Currently, I am focused on responding to two RFPs where our role falls under what I categorize as impact analysis. One is in the Bay Area, and one is in Buffalo, New York, and both task respondents with identifying and estimating the costs and benefits of their investments (various climate mitigation measures and a multi-use greenway, respectively) to frontline communities. I am thankful to the proposal process for forcing me to reflect and realize how many of these sorts of projects Cityfi and I have actually done at this point, and how much I enjoy this work.

As for our approach, it begins with the recognition that there are templates and knowledge out there to build upon. The EPA has some great resources for anyone to use. Buffalo did extensive community outreach before getting to this point, which is always helpful for understanding a city’s specific context. And of course, we at Cityfi have spent years building our social impact calculator as discussed in several blog posts. Hopefully, we will have more updates to share in the future if either of these projects come to fruition.