BEYOND OIL Introduction -Staff Life After Oil -Jeremiah Creedon Bill Ford Has a Better Idea -Martin Wright The Rail Revival -Jay Walljasper Car-Sharing in Portland -Steve Gutmann Motorless in Montreal -Nick Peck Discuss Life After Oil in Café Utne. Click here: café.utne.com

Several years ago, Amanda and I taught in Rome. We discovered the joys of urban living by making our way around by bike, bus, subway, and train. We met the local shopkeepers, took long walks on cobblestone streets, listened to street musicians, and drank coffee in the sunshine at outdoor cafés.

When we returned home to Portland, Oregon, we decided to live in the same car-free way, moving to a dense, vibrant neighborhood with nearby services, and considering only jobs within a reasonable (bikeable, that is) commute. But Portland isn’t Rome. There’s plenty of coffee but also lots of rain. It also isn’t particularly easy to navigate by bus. We quickly found that there were times—about once every couple of weeks—when we really wished we had a car. Our decision to live car-free began to feel less like a principled choice and more like a pointless sacrifice, especially when we found ourselves caught in Portland’s soaking drizzle. It was ecologically responsible but psychologically unsustainable. Eventually we started looking for a car.

But car sharing saved the day. Modeled after similar programs in Europe, CarSharing Portland (CSP) is basically a membership-based hourly car rental service. Here’s how it works: After collecting a $25 application fee, CSP checks applicants’ driving records and credit histories. If everything checks out, new members then pay a $10 per month fee and receive a key that fits every car in the fleet.

CSP currently has 18 vehicles—mostly Dodge Neons, and one Toyota pickup. Most are practically new. Each car is parked in a designated spot downtown or throughout Portland’s close-in, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods. Two hundred eighty-two members share these 18 vehicles, and the company adds new cars as new members join, so there are typically 15 to 18 members per car.

When a member wants to use a car, she calls a touch-tone registration system and reserves the closest available vehicle. With a little advance planning, availability is hardly ever a problem, but getting a car on short notice sometimes requires a bike ride if the closest cars are already in use.