Bad news for car-free households: Gig Car Share is shutting down in December

Having access to pay-by-the-minute or pay-by-the-day cars nearby that included roof racks for bicycles made out-of-town bicycle adventures so much easier for car-free Seattleites.

Gig Car Share's fleet of pay-as-you-drive Priuses and their pre-installed bicycle roof racks will leave town December 27 as the AAA-owned company ceases all operations, according to an email I received as a Gig member. Geekwire reports that the shutdown is for the whole operation, not just Seattle.

This is a huge blow to car-free households in Seattle because the Gig cars were by far the most useful of any of the free-floating car share services we've had since the launch of Car2Go in 2013. Gig launched at a very strange time back in 2020 when the news got very buried for obvious reasons, and it never felt like the service ever had a high-profile introduction to the city. It was just sort of here one day, and the people who found them and tried them out loved them. Thanks to SDOT's data sharing requirements, we can see exactly how many trips people took each month since Gig launched:

You can see how strange and subdued the 2020 launch was. It took a year before the service really caught on. The peak was 872 average daily trips in April 2022. June saw the most use so far in 2024 with only 624. From the SDOT New Mobility Program's data dashboard.

I am one of the people who loved Gig. My family doesn't own a car, and so we walk, bike and take transit for nearly every trip. But every once in a while, there are trips that are impractical without a car. Or just not as fun. That's where Gig really shined. All their cars have roof racks installed with space for two bicycles, leaving plenty of space for whatever else you need to bring. So when our friends were getting married near Lake Crescent, for example, we were able to get all three of us plus our bikes out there easily and for about the cost of a regular rental car (their $120/day rate includes insurance, Seattle street parking, and gas). But unlike regular rental cars, Gig cars are likely to be available nearby and you can return them by just parking them on your street. No need to figure out how you're going to get home from the rental company's lot. Oh, and did I mention the bike racks?!?

Maybe there just aren't enough car-free households looking for bike-friendly cars to rent to sustain an entire business like this. 624 trips per day in June 2024 doesn't sound so bad, but I suppose it's not enough to sustain a business with so many vehicles to take care of. To put Gig's usage in context, scooter and bike share companies reported 18,300 trips per day in June 2024.

I love Gig, but I only used it a handful of times because I don't like driving. It's a real bummer to see it go since it is difficult for me to imagine a service that would ever meet my car-sharing desires better than Gig does. There was never very much marketing behind the service, and perhaps they were banking too hard on people being familiar with the concept even though it's still a weird thing to rent a car with your phone.

So what do we do without Gig? There's Zipcar, which can work well for some people but not really for my use case. There's Turo, which is like Spokeo (or AirBNB) but for cars. That might work for you if you happen to be near someone renting the kind of vehicle you need for a reasonable price, but I do not have such a neighbor. Or there are regular rental car companies, which come with all the same old headaches as always and may or may not have a car capable of carrying your bicycles. Perhaps this is an opening for one of these services to start offering and advertising easy bike-hauling options.

Are you a car-free Gig user? What are your plans after December 27?