By Bill Lindelof Sacramento Bee Staff Writer, Sacramento CA, USA (Published Feb. 3, 1999)

PLEASANTON -- For the past two weeks, Roy Floreyand Sandy Mathews have probably shared the same Honda, but they didn't know each other until they were introduced on Tuesday.
It's not that either is extremely shy. They simply travel at different times.
Florey and Mathews are participants in the most technically sophisticated test of car sharing in the United States.
The yearlong project by the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis, eventually will involve 60 Bay Area residents who, for the most part, will leave their personal cars in their garages.
Instead, they will share 12 Honda Civics in a program called CarLink. It is hoped the test will show that car sharing makes sense, leading to environmental gains, less highway congestion and lower travel costs.
Some participants will use the cars to drive from home to the BART station and then, at the end of the day, back home again.
Others will use those same vehicles to drive from the BART station to their jobs at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and then back to the BART station when the workday is over.
Still others will use the cars during the day to see business clients or run personal errands.
Florey, who lives in Livermore and works at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, thinks the program is going well. It works this way for the 44-year-old hospital auditor
He keeps a car in the evening and on weekends, using it for errands. At 630 a.m. on workdays, he drives it to the Dublin/Pleasanton BART station, where he parks in a designated spot for CarLink vehicles.
Before riding BART the rest of the way to Oakland, Florey drops the car key off in a locked blue box that can be opened only with a card key and an individual's personal identification number.
"Someone else picks it up and takes it to the Livermore Lab," he said.
That someone might be Mathews, a 32-year-old environmental analyst at the lab. She met Florey for the first time Tuesday when the system was unveiled at a news conference.
Before joining CarLink, the Hayward resident drove her own car 60 miles round-trip each day to work.
Now her commute works this way She drives four miles to the Castro Valley BART station in her own car, rides the train to the Dublin/Pleasanton BART station and takes one of the Hondas - perhaps the one Florey left in the lot -- to her job 13 miles away in Livermore.
"My commute has gone from 60 miles to eight miles on my car," she said. "Right now I'm faced with replacing a 10-year-old car or doing expensive repair work on it. So, I could prolong the life of the car for quite a bit only going eight miles a day."
Mathews said there are few drawbacks. When she has to work late, she can call up the program and alert them to make one of the extra cars at the station available for folks who need to drive home.
Davis doctoral candidate Susan Shaheen, a researcher at UCD's Institute of Transportation Studies, is the CarLink manager.
She said traffic congestion and environmental concerns will change the one person-per-car commute in the future. Car sharing could make more efficient use of mass transit.
Fewer cars would be shared by many people, some of them car-pooling in a CarLink vehicle to the train in the morning.
So far, 15 people are participating in CarLink. Others will join within the next two weeks as "day users" at the Lawrence Livermore Lab sign on.
The commuters are divided into three groups "Homeside" commuters who drive the cars to thestation and keep the vehicles overnight pay $200 a month to participate in the program.
"Workside" commuters take BART to the station and drive to the lab. They pay $60 a month.
Finally, day users will drive the cars for work or personal use once they get to the lab and deposit them back there by the end of the workday. They pay $1.50 an hour and 10 cents a mile.
The charges in this test are about the same as they would be for an actual commuter program of this type.
Car sharing is a concept that has been prevalent in Europe for years. The first car-sharing organization was founded in Switzerland in 1948. Today, there are more than 200 such organizations from Scotland to Austria.
Shaheen studied those programs, traveling extensively in Europe. Her design combines the car-sharing methods of established programs with other features, such as a partnership with industry, including Honda, which has donated and will maintain the cars; the use of clean-burning compressed gas vehicles; a radio-frequency tracking system; and a transit hub, namely BART.
Also, an electronic key box handles billing, reservations and allows for access to car keys without the need of an attendant.
Sacramento residents, too, might someday be sharing more than a seat on the light rail.
"I've actually been approached by some folks in Sacramento to try" car sharing, Shaheen said.
"We could link up these vehicles with the Amtrak or light-rail stations and set up a very similar scenario," she said. "I think when you have transit congestion -- people having difficulty accessing transit and air pollution -- you have a potential marketplace for a system like this."