Proposed partner site locations for charging stations
• CARTA: Lookout Mountain Incline Railway• CARTA: Shuttle Park South• CARTA: Shuttle Park North• CARTA: Shuttle Park North Shore• CBL & Associates Properties Inc.: Hamilton Place mall• CBL & Associates Properties Inc.: Northgate Mall• Chattanooga Airport• Chattanooga Theatre Center• CHI Memorial Hospital: Memorial Main Hospital• City of Chattanooga: Vine Street at Douglas• City of Chattanooga: Warner Park/Chattanooga Zoo• City of Chattanooga: W. 11th St. at Market/Broad• Erlanger Heath System: Erlanger East• Hamilton County Tennessee River Park: Chattanooga State• Kinsey Probasco Hays: Flying Squirrel/Crash Pad• Southern Adventist University• United Methodist Neighborhood Centers Inc.: The Bethlehem CenterAdditional sites are still under evaluation.Proposed partner site locations for solar generators• CARTA Main Facility• Chattanooga Airport• Southern Adventist University
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Learn more about Chattanooga’s electric car-sharing program at greencommuter.org/chattanooga
Any Chattanoogan with a clean driving record and a smartphone soon will be able to rent a Nissan Leaf for $9 an hour under a new electric car-sharing program expected to launch in about a month.
The Chattanooga Area Regional Transportation Authority, the city's bus service, announced it got a $3 million grant from the Tennessee Valley Authority to establish an electric car-sharing service. It will work a lot like the Bike Chattanooga blue-and-yellow rental bicycles, with the swipe of a credit card at various locations around downtown.
"It just adds another transit option," said Brent Matthews, CARTA's director of parking, who thinks there's a growing market for those who only occasionally need a car. "You've got more and more people moving downtown. A lot of folks are going to one vehicle."
CARTA has selected Green Commuter, a Los Angeles-based startup business, to provide 20 Nissan Leafs that will be parked at some 20 new charging stations at locations downtown, at Northgate and Hamilton Place malls and at the Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport.
Chattanooga will be the first place Green Commuter will launch its car-sharing program. The startup company also plans to offer an electric van-sharing program for commuters in Los Angeles, too, using Tesla's Model X seven-passenger sport utility vehicle, said Green Commuter's Operations Manager Kelly Muchnick.
"We're confident that we're going to ace it," Muchnick said of the launch in Chattanooga.
To use a vehicle, Chattanooga riders will be asked to provide Green Commuter their driver's license numbers and other information and pay a $25 application fee to become a member of the program, she said.
Green Commuter was founded by Gustavo Occhiuzzo, whom Muchnick described as a "successful serial entrepreneur." It has received consulting help from Julian Espiritu, the managing director of Abrams Carsharing Advisors and a former executive with Zipcar, the pioneering startup car-sharing business that was founded in 2000 and now has almost one million members.
Chattanooga is the first mid-sized city in the United States to get an electric car-sharing program, said TVA spokesman Scott Fiedler, which puts it in the ranks of larger cities such as Seattle and Indianapolis, Ind.
"That's something all Chattanoogans need to be proud of," he said.
Fiedler said CARTA's electric car-sharing idea was a good fit for TVA's $3 million Solar Assist Electric Vehicle Charging Program grant.
CARTA will equip some of the electric car charging stations with solar panels that will feed electricity into EPB's power grid.
The electric car-sharing program was two years in the making, Matthews said. Another partner in the program is a Chattanooga consultant, the Prova Group LLC, whose CEO and principal Philip Pugliese designed and deployed the city's Bike Chattanooga bicycle-sharing program.
Contact staff writer Tim Omarzu at tomarzu@timesfreepress.com or www.facebook.com/MeetsForBusiness or twitter.com/meetforbusiness or 423-757-6651.