Can Americans share? You bet! Especially for a fee.

Alex Wong/Getty Images:  Bicycles from the Capital Bikeshare program.

That question hung over the rows of identical fire-red bicycles lined up last week for the start of Capital Bikeshare in Washington, the nation’s largest bike-sharing program.

Similar bike share programs began  last year in other US cities, inspired in part, by the success of established bike sharing programs in Europe. Denver, Minneapolis, Washington DC have programs up and running. San Francisco is slated to be up and running in 2012  with focus centered in the Downtown/SOMA corridors to the transportation terminals. The Bay Area also has a membership SF Bicycle Share club started because: "bringing a bike on BART sucks just about as bad as trying to park a bike in an apartment living room.  Designed to be as inexpensive as possible to members, bicycles are parked throughout popular city locations and are available on a "first come, first served" basis.  
Recently, start-up companies with names like:
SnapGoods,
Ziloc,  
NeighborGoods
All these companies are trying to make money by using social networks to let people borrow or lend their stuff, either free or for a modest rental fee, and join a list of established companies such as Netflix and Zipcar.

The approach is built on access to goods and services, rather than ownership. The headline of a missive written by New York Times Magazine story editor, Chris Suellentrop, shouts,  Abandon Ownership! Join the Rentership Society!

We’ll always own some things. There’s stuff we use all the time, like furniture and clothing, and objects with sentimental value (take your stinking paws off my Yoda figure with plastic snake). But the Internet is creating markets that enable us to own much less", writes Suellentrop. "The winner of the ebook sweepstakes will be the bookseller who becomes a bookrenter. I don’t want to own hundreds of books on a Kindle at $10 a pop. I want to Netflix them — pay for access to every book ever published. I’d rather be a renter in Borges’ library than the owner of my own.

Everything, everywhere, all the time. That’s the dream of the Rentership Society. And we’re almost there. If you want to be able to possess some things, in some places, some of the time, well, keep on buying. But I vote for infinite abundance, on demand."

Some scholars say that the Internet — by fostering collaboration on a communal, open platform — has changed the way Americans think about sharing and ownership. Collaborative habits online are beginning to find expression in the real world.

“I thought that online was an exception,” said Yochai Benkler, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, whose coming book, “The Penguin and the Leviathan,” focuses on the explosion of cooperative endeavors, both online and off. “I now am more confident that the phenomenon is not limited to online but is a general phenomenon of human behavior.”

So far, he said, there have been no formal studies into whether the Internet has affected offline cooperation or attitudes about ownership.

But an ethic of sharing has long found a place in the United States, like cooperative farming and car-pooling, which is the second most common form of commuting. Bike sharing, too, is nothing new. Early efforts, beginning with shared bikes on college campuses in the 1960s and early 1970s, relied mostly on trust. That model worked in some small towns like Crested Butte, Colo., but tended to collapse quickly in urban environments. (In 2005, a bike-sharing program started in Edmonton, Canada; 95 percent of its bikes were stolen after three years.)

The bike share programs now spreading to cities like Paris, Washington and Hangzhou, China, follow a subscription model and use electronic tracking to deter theft. (By contrast, college campuses use a library model, with bikes loaned for extended periods of time.)

And like most share programs, a credit card is required for collateral. There may also be membership fees and escalating usage charges. (The first 30 minutes are generally free.) So, while it may be sharing, its success is based on technology — and a deposit.

Companies trying to make money from what is called collaborative consumption are not very big and very new. Each counts its members in the thousands, and together they have a few million dollars in goods available to share.

But it is surprising that consumers are even willing to try it. “Everyone thought we were completely crazy two years ago,” said Micki Krimmel, 32, the founder of NeighborGoods, a sharing service. She said her success was based on a “a desire for community, a desire to be more sustainable and, frankly, it’s the economy.”

Publishers have taken note, with books like Lisa Gansky’s “The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing” and Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers’s “What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption,”.

Elinor Ostrom, a professor of political science at Indiana University a Nobelist in economics, and a recognized leader in the field of resilience theory says social norms and local understandings led groups to share scarce resources. In other words, people don’t always misuse or destroy the commons simply because it doesn’t belong to them personally.

And in a nod to our selfish side, some advocates of sharing are betting that success is based on nothing more than self-interest.

“Sharing takes away all the headaches of ownership and initial cost investment, and people see that pretty clearly,” said Parry Burnap, executive director of Denver Bike Sharing.

Avis, Budget and Enterprise car and truck rental companies caught on to this. It seems the rest of the product world is not catching on.

Source articles:

Wired Magazine: Abandon Ownership! Join the Rentership Society! by Chris Seillentrop 
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/11/st_essay_ownership/

New York Times: Learning to Share, Thanks to the Web by J David Goodman
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/weekinreview/26goodman.html?_r=2