If they can do it in Lawrence, Kansas...

You may (or may not) remember Lawrence from the 80's TV movie The Day After. Although the city has grown in recent decades to almost 90,000 residents, it still has the feel of small town America.

A few months ago, Hertz announced that it was expanding it's car sharing services to Downtown Lawrence. The Hertz On Demand service features four cars at the nearby University of Kansas. After a few years of operations at KU, the company moved forward with the City to place one car off campus for city residents.

We scratch our heads a little about this here at Buffalo CarShare. Certainly there's a market, or a multinational corporation like Hertz wouldn't be moving off campus, but one car? Our research shows that we define "market" a bit more broadly than the rest of the industry. We don't know Lawrence, Kansas very well, but we're guessing there are more than a handful of city residents that could really benefit from a car sharing program.

The same pattern is also emerging in larger cities like Cincinnati - Zipcar just added three hubs downtown. Cincinnati is about the size of Buffalo, and their Mayor touted the potential benefits of the service, namely to "provide access for people who would otherwise not be able to go about their day-to-day activities". We're curious to know how it's going!

This is the idea behind our Startup Symposium on Tuesday, August 6th in Niagara Falls. 
We'll be talking a bit about our model, which is aimed at serving a broad range of households in terms of income, race, and age. We'll also be comparing notes with other car sharing organizations from small and mid-sized cities, such as Ithaca CarShare in the Finger Lakes region of New York and Community CarShare in Southern Ontario.

You can find the full agenda here. Session topics include:

• Choosing a business model
• Growing your organization
• Gaining "anchor institution" and community support
• Identifying funding sources
• Developing college and university partnerships

The Symposium is aimed at communities like Rochester and Albany, among others, that are considering or working to launch car sharing operations in their cities. The Symposium is free, but space is limited, so please RSVP to j.reichert@buffalocarshare.org by Thursday, August 1st.

We'll also be giving demonstrations of our BikeShare program throughout the day. We hope you can join us!