Goodbye, Chevys … Hello, Zipcars?

As the mayor gears up to close a $8 million budget gap, city workers may lose their Cavaliers and share Zipcars instead.

The city is eyeing a deal with ZipCar that would allow municipal workers to use the car-sharing service to get around on city business instead of picking up a car from the city’s fleet.

The city has a fleet of 25 pool cars stored in a parking lot on State Street near the intersection of Wall Street. City workers use the cars when they need to travel short distances on official business. Lawyers from the office of corporation counsel’s office, for instance, might jump in one of the Chevy Cavaliers to drive up to a hearing in Hartford.

The city’s pool cars are rarely driven, according to Ben Martinez, lead mechanic with the Department of Public Works. Martinez is in charge of maintaining the fleet.

Because many of the cars are rarely used, the city is now looking into selling them off and replacing them with Zipcars. Working with the car-sharing service, city workers would then pay for cars only when they use them, instead of paying insurance and maintenance costs for vehicles to just sit in a lot.

That plan being developed by public works chief John Prokop is part of a broader effort to save money for the city, which faces an $8 million hole in the current budget and a projected shortfall of $57 million next fiscal year.

Prokop said a deal with Zipcar could save the city $500,000 over the next four years. That’s based on his conversations with people in New York City and Washington, D.C., cities that have teamed up with Zipcar for their transportation needs.

The Zipcar idea is one piece of a coordinated cost-cutting effort the city is calling Innovation Based Budgeting (IBB). The latest progress on that front is detailed starting on page 7 of the city’s latest monthly financial report. Read the report here.

Prokop outlined the potential savings in an interview last week.

It would cost $66 a day for the city to hire a Zipcar — gassed up and insured — and drive it 180 miles, he said. When you compare that to the $20,000 needed to purchase a new car for the city fleet, Zipcar is a good deal. Even if a Zipcar were used every day for a year, it would cost only a bit more than the purchase price of a new car. And when you factor in the cost of insurance, gas, and repairs on city-owned cars, Zipcar makes even more sense, Prokop calculated.

Prokop said the cars in the State Street lot are used by a half-dozen departments. Some of them are as many as 20 years old but might have only 60,000 miles on them, Prokop said. Martinez said one car from the ​‘90s has only 36,000 miles.

At that rate of driving, the cars are more expensive than they’re worth, Prokop said. A car needs to be driven at least 12,000 miles a year to see the benefit of use outweigh the vehicle’s depreciation in value, he said.

Using Zipcars would save more than money, said Christine Eppstein Tang, head of the city’s office of sustainability. Since Zipcars tend to be hybrid or otherwise fuel-efficient cars, the city would be polluting and consuming less. Tang said her office fully supports the plan.

Prokop said he is yet to speak with anyone from Zipcar. He said he hopes to have a deal in place in three months. It would be the second recent deal between the city and the car sharing company, who recently agreed on a plan to put two Zipcars in the parking garage at the train station.

The city might start by selling off 10 cars and installing five Zipcars, Prokop said. The cars would be available Monday to Friday to city employees, on weekends they could be signed out by any Zipcar member.

A new Zipcar system would require more planning by department heads, Prokop said. Departments would have to use the Zipcar website to sign up in advance to use the cars. The process lends itself to better time management, he argued.

If things go well, the city could sell off the fleet of 25 pool cars completely and use Zipcar exclusively, Prokop said.

During a recent visit to the State Street lot, Martinez welcomed the proposal. The Cavaliers are good cars, but they’re going unused, he said.

“They don’t put a lot of miles on them,” he said. ​“They sit here.”

The cars can go un-driven for weeks at a time, Martinez said. That’s not good for a car, he noted: The tires can rot; moisture can get into the brake lines.

Moving to Zipcar would free up time for the nine mechanics he oversees, Martinez said. Those mechanics work on vehicles belonging to public works, the parks department, Livable City Initiative, and other departments.

“It’s a good idea,” he said.