Fleet Management Department
Press and Media
The City of Houston Expands Its Shared Motor Pool Program, "Fleetshare"
September 19, 2013 -- The Fleet Management Department has announced that its FleetShare program has expanded to its second location. The program first launched with shared pool vehicles in the Theater District’s Tranquility Garage and has recently expanded to the City Hall Annex Garage.
In July 2012, the City of Houston launched a new municipal fleet sharing program called Houston FleetShare with partner Zipcar, Inc., the world’s leading car sharing network. Through this program, 50 City-owned fleet vehicles – including 25 Nissan Leaf electric vehicles (EVs) and other plug-in electric and hybrid vehicles – were outfitted with Zipcar’s proprietary car sharing technology for use by city employees across numerous departments.
“Zipcar is very excited to continue the successful relationship with the City of Houston to bring vehicle efficiency to City employees.” said Michael Serafino, Zipcar Vice President of Sales and Market Development.
Six electric vehicle charging stations were installed in the City Hall Annex Garage allowing for both EVs and hybrid vehicles to be made available at this location.
The expansion of the program to City Hall Annex is the result of a 72% increase of enrolled participants, representing over 7,000 reservations.
The move to a large shared pool of City vehicles is to maximize the efficiency of City resources. “Small individual pools of vehicles have a lot of down time and then tend to be needed all at once,” said Jedediah Greenfield, Fleet Managements’ public information officer. “With a larger shared city vehicle pool, we can ensure our vehicles are being used efficiently through closely monitoring utilization and streamlining their operation which ultimately results in better service to our citizens.”