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BMW’s Car Sharing Program Will Be Pulled Out of San Francisco Due to Parking Permits

Bad news for people that were actually enjoying BMW’s car-sharing service, DriveNow in the US. At the moment, the program is only available in San Francisco but not for long as the Germans announced they will be pulling out of the California city due to a problem with the parking permits.
BMW i3 DriveNow 1 photo
Photo: BMW
It seems that parking permit regulations in San Fran are just too much to handle for BMW and the decision has been made to stop offering the service altogether starting with November 2. While at first you may think that this is just an excuse that the Germans are using to justify a business that isn’t very profitable, looking further into the matter reveals that this may actually be the reason after all.

One of the reasons why we tend to believe them is that they will not stop offering the service altogether but instead focus on other cities. So far, SF was the only one that benefitted from this by the minute car rental program but bad news for the inhabitants of the bay area are good news for others.

We fully expect to return once the city reforms its parking policies to allow for one-way car sharing,” DriveNow said. “We will continue to work with the city of San Francisco toward achieving that goal. We are focusing our efforts on new cities, where our transportation solution can flourish.”

The thing is, others have gone through the same ordeal but while DriveNow at least tried to do something about it and struggled with current regulations, others just turned their back on the whole deal.

For example, Car2Go, a similar service from Daimler AG, didn’t open in San Francisco because they couldn’t get the proper parking permits.

You see, in order for such a system to be viable, people need to be able to park their cars anywhere and leave them there for others to eventually pick up. That would require a sort of ‘superpermit’ that allows the users to park anywhere in the city. That’s just not possible right now, unfortunately.
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