After a year that saw a mass exodus of members, more office drama than an episode of The Office and a general, nagging sense of doom, PhillyCarShare could be poised to make a strong comeback in 2010. Naming new executive director Gerald A. Furgione back in December has already seemed to be a popular move, and this week comes the news that now, PhillyCarShare members will have access to other car-sharing services in a variety of other markets, including Chicago, Toronto, San Francisco, Denver and more. Though it remains to be seen how much that access will actually be used, the partnerships PCS have struck up with other cities lend a depth to the service that just wasn’t there before.

And perhaps “depth” has been the answer to the problems face by PCS all along. For a while, the scuttlebutt in various PCS circles has speculated that all last year, PCS wanted to thin the herd. Why? The rumor goes, it was costing them the same price to insure a member that used PCS all the time as it did to insure a member who only used the service once or twice a year. You can see where this might not make the business sense, and some folks we’ve spoken with suggest that this was the motivation behind that controversial membership hike all along. All of which begs the question: Is PhillyCarShare just trying to separate the wheat from the chaff and build a better user? In any case, PCS is rebounding nicely, and if the latest comment on this older PCS post — it’s the one that, to this day, seems to generate the most late-night/random “insider” PCS knowledge for some reason — it could rebound even further if Zipcar starts upping its rates. At present, rates for Zipcar and rates for PhillyCarShare remain competitive, depending on what you’re looking for, but who knows what the future holds. We get the feeling that’s a phrase uttered a lot around the PCS offices as well.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 at 11:36 am.