Emily Castor

I rent my car to strangers – dozens of strangers I never meet. They book a time slot to use my 2008 Honda Civic on peer-to-peer car-sharing website Getaround, we make cursory arrangements via email or text message, and then they drive off with the most valuable asset I own.

Sharing… parking tickets

Last month, one of my renters got nabbed with a $75 ticket for illegally parking in a loading zone in downtown San Francisco. I didn’t discover it until last week when I was on the San Francisco Muncipal Transportation Agency’s online violation payment system - to pay another $90 ticket, which another renter incurred that week for parking my car in a red zone. I spent the morning going back and forth with my renters and the SFMTA to straighten things out. By the end of the day, the tickets were paid by the parties responsible.

The next night, I received a text message at 3:30 AM from yet another renter with a helpful photo of where my car was parked: in a metered space, which would cause it to be ticketed first thing in the morning. I had to call him and ask him nicely – restraining my inner “why did you wake me up at 3:30 AM?!” she-beast growl – to return to my vehicle at the crack of dawn and park it in a legal spot.

Yes, I let dozens of strangers drive my car, and sometimes they screw up. For my renters, just as for me, the overlapping parking regulations governing San Francisco’s streets are inscrutable and onerous. Sometimes these poor souls are just too tired to notice that they’ve committed a violation, or they forget to fill up the gas. This is because they are human.

Restoring community-based commerce

Car-sharing services like Getaround are among the most popular examples of collaborative consumption, an emerging model for peer-to-peer commerce based on the idea that it is economically, environmentally, and socially beneficial for people to share under-utilized assets with others who need them.

This mumbo-jumbo may sound newfangled. In fact, online peer-to-peer sharing restores time-tested patterns of community interdependence that existed before modern society took hold. Before cars, planes, and an increasingly specialized labor market encouraged geographic transience and the fracturing of families across countries and the world, people lived in stable communities where they knew their neighbors. In that environment, they frequently shared property and bartered goods and services. They were used to coping with human foibles as part of the process of commerce.

As other collaborative consumption advocates have noted, web technology and the emergence of an internet of people now enable us to restore the social capital of the past – even if we live among strangers.

But that requires trust. Since we haven’t had lifetimes of interaction with our online counterparties in peer-to-peer transactions, we must rely on other cues to gauge their reliability. The development of robust mechanisms for measuring participant trustworthiness in peer-to-peer sharing marketplaces is now a dominant concern of stakeholders in the sharing movement. I follow those conversations closely, and believe trust tools will be critical to wider adoption of collaborative consumption.

Embracing the human element

What advocates don’t often say is that reputation measurement will never remove the unpredictable human element from peer-to-peer transactions. It will weed out fraud and bad actors with ill intentions, but responsible people with good credit scores, many LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter connections, professional and academic credentials, and histories of reliable participation online will still occasionally screw up – like my renters.

That’s OK with me. My participation in this system gives me real value. I earn hundreds of dollars each month renting my car, and I like the feeling of community I receive by offering a service to others in my city. The site has policies and insurance to protect me from financial losses, so the only risk I take is that I may have to sort out the occasional renter snafu.

I choose not to let that hassle stop me. If I want to be part of a community-based economy of exchange, I enter that community as an individual, dealing with other individuals. Peer-to-peer transactions are not the mechanical, cookie-cutter interactions we experience as consumers of corporate services. And just like any small business owner, I must provide customer service and sort out unexpected bumps in the road. It’s part of the deal.

When I find out about tickets or infractions by my renters, I don’t get angry or swear off sharing. I contact them, politely explain what’s up, and ask them to take responsibility for correcting their mistakes. So far, they always have. Because we’re in a community, we depend on each other, and relationships are valuable.