The concept of selling mobility-on-demand rather than cars may be gaining some traction. Remember the stackable urban rental cars proposed by GM-funded researchers at MIT last fall? The issues of Forbes magazine to appear on magazine stands next week touts the MIT City Car concept as the embodiment of a new car-sharing direction for troubled automakers. City Car co-designer Bill Mitchell of the MIT Media Lab’s Smart Cities group adds to the drumbeat in an editorial for architecture website BD. “People don’t want cars, they want personal mobility,” writes Mitchell.

Mitchell argues that, rather than bailing out car firms, governments should be radically rethinking urban transport around ultra-lightweight battery electric vehicles (EVs). To provide mobility most efficiently, says Mitchell, we should…

…organise urban electric cars in mobility-on-demand systems like the Vélib bicycle system in Paris. Racks of public-use cars would be provided at closely spaced sites across the service area. If you want to go somewhere, you walk to a nearby rack, swipe a card, pick up a car, drive it to a rack near your destination, and drop it off.

In fact, Paris is already planning the auto equivalent of Vélib, which offers over 20,000 bikes at more than 1,400 sites in the city and is now expanding to the suburbs. Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë announced in June that the city will place 4,000 electric cars at 700 Autolib pick-up points around Paris and the suburbs starting in 2010. French trains giant SNCF is reportedly vying to operate the Autolib points out of its train stations, which are distributed across and around the French capital, according to business daily Les Echos [story en Français].

The city may have a solution to a potential game-killing problem: the inevitably uneven distribution of vehicles as cars pile up at popular destinations. Parisian’s are well aware of this problem. Mid-morning, for example, as Vélib stations at the periphery of the city empty out and those downtown jam up, it’s not unusual to see trucks redistributing the bikes to counter the tide. That’s easy enough with bikes, but harder to envision with even small EVs.

The city’s solution, according to a leaked document reported by autonews website Caradisiac [en Français], is to have users declare their destination upon checking out a car. In response, the system will determine the closest Autolib point with a free spot for drop-off and reserve that space.

No news on another potential problem for Paris’ Autolib: the name.  Lyon, which beat Paris to the bikeshare program with its own vélo’v, already sports a conventional car-share program called Autolib.

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