Ryan McKenzie of CityWheels

Imagine what your life would be like if you didn't have to make a car payment every month, pay for auto insurance, or make those periodic trips to the auto mechanic. Now imagine if you could also reduce the impact that automobiles have on the environment. Sounds like something you'd be interested in? Cool Cleveland's Information Officer George Nemeth talks with Ryan McKenzie about his startup—a carsharing program call CityWheels.

George Nemeth: Could you explain a little bit about CityWheels and what was your personal motivation to do this?

Ryan McKenzie: Yes. My whole career I’ve worked on making city living more affordable and competitive, from a quality of life standpoint. I had environmental motivation, just to improve air quality, reduce possible fuel use, but really I just wanted to create a Cleveland that I would want to live in. It gets down to a certain enlightened self-interest, I guess.

Enlightened self-interest is a great term for it.

I want this neighborhood to have the amenities that make me want to stay here, that make my wife want to stay here, and that our two-year-old daughter can grow up and feel good about being here, instead of having to move out either to a suburb or to another city entirely. I lived in the Ohio City neighborhood on my own for eight years without owning a car. Most of the time that was great. I sure saved a lot of money, but sometimes it would have been wonderful to have access to a car just for a few hours or half a day at a time. It would’ve made life a lot easier. In my work with EcoCityCleveland and on my own before that, trying to improve conditions for walking and biking and public transportation, I learned about car-sharing. It was a concept that came out of Europe more than 20 years ago. It came to Canada more than ten years ago. It came into the U.S. in 1998, and I watched it over the years as it spread to what’s now 18 metro areas, and it made a lot of sense to me that there’s a market here. It’s not the same huge market that there would be in Boston or D.C. or New York, San Francisco, but there is a market, and I’m living proof of it. There are others out there like me who would like to save money, who would like to not have to own one car for every driver in a household. And so I decided in February of this year to start it up.

Now let’s talk about where the cars are for a little bit. How many cars do you have now?

We have just four cars at the moment. Oberlin College was the first to invite us in, in February, which was the start of their second semester.

Let’s stop right there for a second, because just last week when the Oberlin kids came up from David Orr’s class and they took a tour with Paul Alsenas of Cuyahoga Valley, they used the car to get here to Cleveland, right?

They took both of the cars that we have out at Oberlin.

So you have two cars out there?

Yes. We’ve got a Prius and a Scion XP out in Oberlin. We started that in February for the start of Oberlin’s second semester. A month later we put a Prius in Ohio City, and we put another Scion XP at Coventry in Cleveland Heights.

There’s new stuff coming online soon right?

I’m going to take the Scion out of Oberlin for the summer because the demand will drop there and put it into downtown Cleveland.

Where’s that going to be located?

I haven’t decided. If anybody’s reading wants to find me a parking spot for free and have it right outside or inside their building that would be great. My first thought had been the Chesterfield. We had made a connection with the property manager. I guess things move fast in the property management world and that person is now gone. The model that I’d like to pursue is that we are in residential buildings so they’d have their own structured parking, or surface parking lots. So whether that’s the Bingham or in the Warehouse District, or the Chesterfield or Reserve Square.

Where do you think it’s going to get the most use? Which district would you imagine would get the most use downtown?

I think it’s a toss up between that East 12th Street corridor because in a very short walk you have the Statler, Chesterfield, Reserve Square. You’ve got the Avenue District coming online, and in a short distance from there you also have a ton of offices that could use a car during the day, but the same thing applies to the Warehouse District. You’ve got huge residential concentrations, and you also have consulting, architecture, engineering firms plenty of daytime businesses that don’t need a car every single day. Parking rates are high. If they could get away from having to pay those monthly parking passes, maybe some of them already live downtown and want to walk to work, or it’s convenient enough to take a bus or ride a bike, they could be freed up from having to, from a business perspective, deal with the car for just because they need it once or twice a week to visit clients. So I think that those are my two early targets certainly, but we want to be around Public Square obviously. Ninth and Euclid is going to be a great opportunity as the County moves its operation there over the next few years. They’re going to have some pretty big parking challenges and the need for access to cars once in a while. CSU too. I haven’t talked with them yet, but they’re investing quite a bit of money to make it into more of a campus feeling and more of a live-on campus. Fenn Tower this August I believe is getting converted to several hundred housing units. That’s people who certainly don’t need a car every day and it’s going to cost them for parking, and they have insurance rates to worry about, and just the upkeep of the car is not something a student really wants to deal with. They’re a great alternative. Pay by the hour, give it back and let us deal with everything else.

How much do gas prices impact walkable cities and people using alternative transportation?

Personally I’m always… and not to make light of people’s concern about gas prices, but I know that the cost of owning a car is annually… Only about 10% of that is gasoline, even at these rates. We had amnesia about the checks we write for car payments, insurance payments. It’s unpleasant as we’re doing it, and then we go on with our day, and those are huge chunks of money, and meanwhile we obsess about whether we’re at $2.80 or $3.00 a gallon. It’s not a large amount of money going out of the bank account comparatively. So from an operational standpoint, it doesn’t hurt us terribly, unless they really spike. Gas prices have a power over people’s evaluation of how they’re going to get around. I mean really, it makes people rethink the way, “Maybe I don’t need to have this second beater car, or maybe it’s time for me to think about taking the bus,” because they’re spending 30 bucks a week filling up the gas tank, but not basing it on the thousands to get into the game at all. And that’s the whole point of car-sharing. Once you’ve made a commitment to own the vehicle, the cost of operating it, as much as we complain about gas, it’s tiny when you compare it to what initially you put down. You’re going to pay for the car payment and the insurance, whether that thing sits in the garage or on the street 95% of the time or not. So you have every incentive to use it. Why? Why would you ride a bike, if it’s cold? Why would you walk at night? Why would you take the bus, if it’s going to take three times as long as driving, when you’ve got that car sitting outside your door? So what we, what car-sharing can do is help people break that ownership need, free up a lot of cash, and then maybe wean themselves off of needing to drive everywhere, as they get more comfortable with other ways of getting around, or maybe they decide, “I’m going to move out of the suburbs, and I’m moving into downtown or into Ohio City or Shaker Square,” or someplace where they can live a lower mileage lifestyle. And as they’re getting up to speed with what their options are, how they’re going to get their everyday needs met, for shopping… You’ve obviously got to get to work, but after that, shopping, I mean to visit friends, having to go out and have fun at night and to go cold turkey from car ownership is too big for just about everybody.

So you’re talking about "The Patch" for car owners?

That’s right.

That’s funny. What I like to do with A & Q w/ G is to give people the opportunity ask questions of Cool Cleveland readers, so given the chance, what would you want to hear about from them?

As somebody who’s bringing something that’s a brand new idea to a city that too often thinks of itself as not very cutting edge, I have all sorts of need for feedback. What kinds of cars do people want? Where does the public think that this is the most valuable? How do I make the business sell? Residential is easy to understand, but business is a little tougher for people. So I’m still trying to figure out what’s the best way for a very small business in start-up mode to have that communication with both our customers, but also the much larger community that’s interested in it, supportive of it, wants to see it grow, and doesn’t pick up the phone and call me or e-mail me.

And your website is CityWheelsCleveland.com?

We’re migrating to MyCityWheels.com.

Okay.

It’s just pure letters, and it’s reflective of the fact that we hope that we get into other markets. Even right now with the fact that we started in Oberlin there’s a little bit of tension putting Cleveland front and center on it, if we’re going to be at Oberlin, if we get down to Akron and Kent, just to name a few that are right in our backyard, but don’t necessarily call themselves Cleveland. So it’s MyCityWheels.com.

You were funded by the Civic Innovation Lab.

It is wonderful.

Let’s talk about that.

Sure. I think I had heard of them in passing about a little more than a year ago, but it was a friend from Cleveland Public Art who said, “Hey, you really ought to check this out. They would love your idea, and this is what Civic Innovation Lab is designed for, to take people with good ideas and hook them up with a little bit of cash and connections through the mentoring process.” So I went through an application process that was short and very easy, and then this is speaking of somebody who’s always been in the non-profit sector having to write grant proposals. This was like a one-page proposal. Very little paperwork. I was amazed. And I got a call back from the staff...

“Staff” meaning Jennifer Thomas…

Jennifer Thomas.

…and Hannah Fritzman.

Now it’s Hannah Fritzman. At the time, it was a part-timer at Cleveland Public Art who was also helping Jennifer Thomas out part-time. It was Tiffany Graham, which is maybe where the Cleveland Public Art awareness really was keyed in. And I had a meeting with Jennifer, a one-hour meeting. They interviewed me. They loved it. They invited me to come back and present to the mentors. I stressed out a lot about a 10-minute presentation but I went and did that presentation, and afterwards Chris Carmody from the Cleveland Film Commission raised his hand among the mentors and said, “I want to work with this guy.” And that meant I was in. They funded me at their maximum, which is $30,000 to help me flush out the idea while I was still working at EcoCityCleveland. We put together a decent website, developed marketing materials, went through Legal, Accounting, and my gosh, there’s a lot to set up my first time being an entrepreneur and starting up a business. And so without that support, and then importantly, Chris’ mentorship and introductions to people downtown (he’s got a big rolodex), and his sense of how to navigate political waters as we try to attract public sector agencies to be car-sharing members, as is happening in several other cities. So it’s been incredibly valuable for me. I know the car-sharing business very well, but I don’t know start-up business. I don’t know Cleveland business and so Civic Innovation Lab made it possible for me to make this happen, to go from idea to reality.

So my last question would be, if you have the opportunity in the future to help other people navigate that stuff, will you and are you looking forward to it?

I think I have a whole lot more to learn myself before I’m ready to be dishing out advice, but yeah, certainly. I’ve been a civic-minded guy practically my whole life, and I want to see Cleveland succeed. I built my house here with my own hands in Ohio City. I want to keep innovating. I want the quality of life to keep improving. I want the economy to keep growing. So yeah, anything I can do to help other people who feel similarly, feel passionately about making Cleveland better, I’m there. They might not always want to take my advice, ‘cause we’re all still learning at this game, but I’m there.

Great, Ryan. Thank you.

Visit CityWheels at http://www.MyCityWheels.com. Also, see Ray Holan's article posted on AutoBlogGreen.com. Finally, if you're in the Cleveland Heights area, the CityWheels' service there was being underutilized, so Ryan has decided to move the vehicle. It's new location will be @ the Tower Press Building in the Midtown District. A good move, considering it's proximity to artists and CSU students. (:divend:)