this is great news. personally, i hope that they have success with this program and expand it, eventually, nationwide.
i find it atrocious that a "free" country" denies anyone under 21 the right to rent out a car in some fashion. it's about damn time.

Josepf:
Still they can marry and have kids (the biggest responsibility in human life), have to pay taxes in full, and can loose their life while serving in military. How about take away driving licenses from seniors? Or make insurance profiling dependent on skin color or yearly income?

Considering how highly regulated the insurance market it in most states, calling their actions "private choice" is a bit of a non-sequiter. Insurance is a wonderful thing, but don't assume that it works on a free market like the market for apples or widgets, because it doesn't. Aside from regulation, government also intervenes by serving as an insurer of last resort in certain markets -- often correlated natural disaster risk markets -- like homeowner's insurance in parts of Florida or flood insurance in the midwest.

The larger non-sequiter is in assuming that private automobiles are easily foregone by young people, or that the need for private automobiles is the result of a purely free market. A half century of government intervention in the road-building sector is largely responsible for urban living patters that make life without a car often impossible. It isn't so far fetched to imagine that government should now get involved in allowing qualified drivers to fully participate in our urban life. Maybe government should get into the business of organizing insurance of last resort.

Actually, government already does. Most states have an "assigned risk pool" where insurance companies are forced to carry the most irresponsible drivers at a high, but capped, premium. The rest of us -- good drivers -- make up the difference. Similarly, a few states force the major car rental firms to extend rentals to 18 or 21 year olds, and allow a certain daily surcharge to cover the insurance. Avis and Hertz have not pulled out of New York on account of that.

The right to rent a car is really the right to insurance -- because everyone knows that the only thing standing between a 20 year old and the Avis counter is an actuary. Insurance is one of those markets where the government really does -- and should -- intervene to make sure that those who are left out by the ordinary market get at least some basic service.

The final non sequiter is "collateral." When I rent a car, a $250 hold is placed on my credit card. That's all. I'm still fairly young, and I have no major assets. The car rental firm doesn't care. If I wreck the car and haven't bought their CDW, they'll try to go after me, but write it off if they can't get anywhere. It's part of their business model. At any rate, my regular auto insurance actually does cover that, so I know I'm not flying bare -- but they don't know that.

And when I start that rental firm, I'll need to get insurance on those cars. Insurance is a legal necessity and is provided by an highly regulated market.

I don't advocate "forcing" Avis or Hertz to do anything they don't want to do. I do advocate a re-thinking our "insurance of last resort" policies, and broadening them to the point where Avis and Hertz will voluntarily rent to at least portions of higher risk groups. Since insurance of last resort is something government already does plenty of, I don't consider that a huge leap, or major infringement on our holy free markets.

Auto insurance is almost exclusively a state government matter.

That is in response to your notion that we should "lobby the feds."

Reduced to semantic niggling on this one? If you're going to speak of "rights", then it most certainly is a federal issue.

Those cars are private property held by rental companies. They should be allowed to contract with whomever they wish to use their cars.

Should the government tell you that someone can just use your personal car whenever they want to? You keep ignoring the fact that these cars are private property.

Flexcar should be commended for reaching out to younger people with their service. That took a lot of creativity, and they are taking risks many companies aren't willing to take.

But don't classify renting a car as a "right", nor insist that any government should intervene in the car insurance market to distort pricing for a high-risk group. With that same logic, we should set up special "last resort" insurance for credit cards and force banks to give jobless teenagers with no assets and no credit history unlimited access to credit. Because you could start making arguments that unequal access to capital is unfair in a society that demands people have access to capital in order to compete and survive.

Maybe the government should also set up "last resort" insurance for people who want to build their homes on active volcanoes, since insurance companies probably won't insure them against loss.

If adults were being immobilized (ie, there was no car insurance available for young people at all), then perhaps you'd have a case. But the fact is that if someone wants to own a car and assume risks with their own property, insurance companies seem to have no problem with putting a price on that. But, again, the big rental firms tend to be self-insured, so you're basically asking them to risk their assets on a high-risk group, with only their own financial resources to cover any potential losses - both in terms of property and liability.

This is why raising this whole issue of auto dependence, especially to someone like me, is completely off-topic. I'm well aware of auto dependence in this country.

Federally-backed volcano-zone insurance -- not as far-out as you might expect. At present, the Federal government backs a huge amount of the flood risk in the present homeowner's insurance market.

Both of which are bad policy. Why should people who make decisions to avoid high-risk areas subsidize people who choose to take those risks?

I am merely making the point that *since* we are so auto-dependent, and *since* the government bears a lot of the responsibility for they, they should therefore think about making up for some of the downside, which is decreased mobility for certain sectors of society. An easy way to do this would be to intervene (again) in the insurance market, which would make it affordable and profitable for some auto renters to voluntarily choose to enter the 18 or 21 year old market.

How do young people have decreased mobility? I got my license the day I turned 16. I got my first car the same day. What exactly is your point? How are young people's mobility being limited?

You're basically proposing that everyone else should be in the business of subsidizing automobile use by young people.

I merely suggest that a re-insurance scheme for some fraction of the 18 or 21 year old auto rental market might increase overall mobility and therefore overall good.

How does giving 18 year old boys subsidized auto rental insurance increase the "overall good" in society? I'm not seeing that. I'm seeing how carsharing increases the "overall good" in society, and I'm also seeing a private firm take private action to extend their service to the group you're referring to. So why exactly is government intervention necessary? We need to have young people putting on more vehicle miles than they currently do? We need them engaging more in the most risky activity, by a huge margin, for their age group?

One could easily argue that society's "overall good" would be bettered if we REDUCED the amount of car use by young people. It certainly would save a lot of lives and heartache.

But considering how regulated the insurance market really is, SOME form of government prodding may be necessary to get this going on a wider scale. Minimally, it should be thoroughly studied, and the results published for all to read.

You keep running back to this notion that if something is regulated (and pretty much everything is regulated to one degree or another), then government intervention is always a good idea?

In the 18-20 age group, 40% of all deaths are kids dying in cars. For the 18-24 group, it's 34%. For adults 25 and over, that number is 1%.

For nonfatal injuries, the numbers are 19%, 18%, and 13% for the respective age cohorts.

Those numbers don't even include pedestrians, cyclists, or motorcyclists, nor do they take into account the 2,600 kids below the age killed and 328,000 injured in the US in a year from riding in personal vehicles.

Mobility via automobile can be important in this society, but please don't ignore the disproportionate risks to the younger age groups.