For the next year, 60 Bay Area residents will try to leave their personal cars in the garage and instead share the use of 12 Hondas in the largest, most technically sophisticated test of car sharing in the United States. Called CarLink: A Smart Car-Sharing System, the program is a research project of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis. CarLink project partners in government and private industry include the Bay Area Rapid Transit District, American Honda Motor Company Inc., Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the California Department of Transportation. The goal of CarLink is to learn whether people in this region can make car sharing work for commuting and running errands. "Our personal cars sit unused in parking lots and garages an average of 23 hours per day. When we do use them, they usually carry only one person," said CarLink project manager and lead researcher Susan Shaheen, a doctoral candidate at UC Davis. "With car sharing, the individual still has a car to use whenever they need it. But when they aren't using it, someone else can. Car sharing could have many benefits -- for the owner, who saves money on car payments, insurance and maintenance; for the community, which needs less highway construction and traffic management; for businesses, which need smaller parking lots; and for the environment, which suffers less water and air pollution," Shaheen continued. "It's such a simple concept, you wonder why people haven't done more of this." In Europe, people have. The first car-sharing organization was founded in Switzerland in 1948. Today there are more than 200 such organizations from Scotland to Austria, with more than 100,000 members. The United States and Canada have just nine car-sharing organizations (excluding CarLink) with about 1,000 members. Shaheen traveled extensively throughout Europe and North America in 1997 and 1998, studying the details of existing car-sharing programs. Then, with input from the CarLink partners, she designed the year-long research program. The design combines proven elements of other successful programs with these unique features: -- CarLink is a partnership between public agencies and private industry. -- It will employ the most advanced technology available for managing vehicle reservations and billing, called COCOS (CarSharing Organization and Communication System), and Teletrac, a radio-frequency-based vehicle-tracking system. Both COCOS and Teletrac are CarLink technology partners. -- It will feature three types of driver bases, or "ports": the homes of the drivers, a transit hub (the Dublin/Pleasanton BART station) and several hubs at a large employment center (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory). -- It will operate using Honda Civic GX sedans, powered by a dedicated natural gas 1.6-liter engine certified as the cleanest internal combustion engine vehicle ever tested by the government. The Honda of America Manufacturing plant in East Liberty, Ohio, is the sole production source for the Civic GX. "The one-person, one-car approach to transportation is not sustainable," said UC Davis professor Daniel Sperling, an internationally recognized expert on sustainable transportation and director of the Institute of Transportation Studies. "Smart car sharing is an innovative step in the right direction -- toward transportation that is more economic, equitable and environmental." Media contacts: -- Susan Shaheen, Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Davis, (530) 752-1934, sashaheen@ucdavis.edu -- Sylvia Wright, News Service, UC Davis, (530) 752-7704, swright@ucdavis.edu