Some Startups Actually Do Make the World a Better Place
Mother Jones
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When Gabriel Metcalf co-founded City CarShare at the age of 26, the first technology platform to give urbanites easily access a car when they needed one—even for an hour—he wasn’t looking to cash in. Metcalf, an environmentally minded urban planner, had loftier goals. He envisioned a nonprofit car-sharing collective that would go mainstream, freeing Americans from the burdens of private car ownership and removing countless carbon-spewing vehicles from the road in the process.
Unlike your average tech startup, City CarShare was (and still is) an “alternative institution”—one that sets out to change the status quo by offering a new model for doing things. More examples? Worker-owned cooperatives. Community land trusts. And even good old representative democracy, which began in the colonies as a parallel system to British rule and provided the structural underpinnings for self-governance in the wake of the American Revolution.
Now 45, Metcalf no longer runs the car-sharing service. He’s president of SPUR, a Bay Area nonprofit that helps solve regional problems related to things like transit infrastructure, affordable housing, and climate change adaptation. But he’s still spreading his gospel via a new book, Democratic by Design, which explores the historical track record of alternative institutions, looks at what makes them succeed and fail, and calls on activists to incorporate AIs in their arsenal of solutions to society’s most intractable problems.
Mother Jones: With City CarShare, you hoped to out-compete the private automobile in the cities where you operated. Do you look back and think, “Boy, was I naïve?”
Gabriel Metcalf: No. Since we launched, car ownership has actually been declining quite a bit—for people who live in cities and for young people. I think we were tapping into something in the zeitgeist about Americans being sick of spending time sitting in traffic and not wanting to deal with the hassles of car ownership.
Originally posted here –
