Planting Liberally

A couple of weeks ago at Cambridge Drinking Liberally, my fellow drinkers and I chatted about peak oil, and the world of hurt we're all going to be in as oil prices start to climb irreversibly. My co-host has been reading a bit too much of The Oil Drum, I guess. We all had a good old fashioned freak-out about an impending environmental and humanitarian catastrophe. Good times. It's in the spirit of delaying environmental apocalypse that I'm posting this idea, hoping that somewhere, an enterprising liberal will pick it up, turn it into a serious business, make serious money, and save serious amounts of oil. More than that, this post elaborates on the concept of liberal entrepreneurship, which I posted about back in March. In particular, I'm exploring the notion of using consumer spending as a revenue stream for liberal entrepreneurship. My larger point - outside the particulars of car-free consulting - is that progressive values can be woven into daily life in a way that's financially beneficial. Helping consumers reap the financial benefits of a progressive lifestyle is not just a good way to make money, it's a great way to strengthen the progressive movement, by making our values real to people who may or may not be politically engaged. But enough theory; let's get down to dollars and cents. The goal of a car-free consultant is to help her clients go about their daily lives without having to own a car. As I envision it, a car-free consultation would be a two- or three-week affair composed of three or four client meetings, during which the consultant and her client would work together to nail down the client's weekly schedule, and to find ways for the client to get through as much of the week as possible without using a car. The consultant's work would involve helping her client puzzle through mass transit and commuter train schedules, apartment listings, bicycle regulations, ZipCar marketing literature, employers' child care policies, and any other information that might be helpful in achieving that goal. Periodically, the consultant would check in with the client to make sure that the plan they had hammered out is still working. For a premium, the consultant could offer to be available during real estate searches, to serve as a kind of car-free real estate agent. If an absolutely car-free existence simply isn't possible, the consultant would help the client reduce her car usage considerably, or would help the client's family go from two cars to one. There are a number of different possible payment models. One that I particularly like is proportional payments: the consultant's payment is some percentage of the amount of money she helps the client save (with a minimum guaranteed payment, perhaps). This model encourages the consultant to reduce car usage as much as possible. Finding clients is a trickier problem. My guess is that a consultant could get a lot of mileage (har-dee-har-har) out of traditional advertising; US consumers have responded to the rising cost of car maintenance, buying less SUVs and less oil overall at a time when oil prices are rising sharply. I imagine that a marketing campaign which highlights how much many can be saved by going car-free would be very effective. Other potential marketing tricks include partnerships with places like real-estate agencies and day care centers (where the real car-free decision is made), or mass transit agencies and other transportation alternative companies, like ZipCar and ReadySetGoose. Incidentally, having poked around the ReadySetGoose site a bit, my guess is that the company is working on an idea somewhat similar to this one, but that's just speculation. A potentially lucrative and effective service-delivery/marketing model is to offer car-free consulting services through an employer. In this case, the consultant's services could be offered to employees as a benefit. More and more businesses appear eager to encourage their employees to get to work without using a car, so I imagine there is some latent demand for this kind of service. A car-free consultant with this kind of setup could help setup car-pool programs, programs to transport employees to mass transit from the job site, and other kinds of employer-sponsored programs to make car-free living more feasible. A similar, and I think intriguing, idea is to lobby a city government to subsidize car-free consulting services for its residents. That opens up a much larger potential pool of clients, and it opens up the potential for much more extensive and systematic municipal car-free reform. The consultant's clients would be a natural source of data regarding the kinds of services which residents need to go car-free, and could be an active constituency lobbying for those programs. My long-term hope for car-free consultants is that they could help bring together city governments, neighborhood citizens groups, mass transit agencies, local business coalitions, and developers in an overarching effort to shape their policies and practices around car-free living. A car-free consultant has a lot to gain from such an effort; if a city and developer work together to plan dense commercial and residential real-estate clustered around mass transit stops, the car-free consultant will eventually garner many new clients. I'm sure this is more or less pie-in-the-sky thinking, but it would be nice to see someone whose financial interests are best served by cohesive regional car-free planning. Regardless, I think car-free consultants are the kind of glue which we need to bring together high energy prices, a renewed environmental consciousness, and growing enthusiasm to address global warming within business and government. I'd certainly like to see some progressives run with this idea.