Is this communism? Is that what I’m doing here? I mean it sounds sort of like communism, advocating for collective ownership of a resource, but I implore all of you who may find this concept distasteful to just hear me out. The concept is really simple: Every neighborhood – made up of, say, 8-12 residences or so – should communally own a pickup truck.
I’m not suggesting that people should or shouldn’t just own trucks privately, because, sure, why not, drive what you like. But I think that there is a significant overall quality of life improvement to be had when a group of people in a small community like a neighborhood have shared access to a pickup truck.
I feel like I’ve had this thought before; it popped into my head most recently when I got my old F-150 going again so I could help my neighbors bring a ton of gravel and slate to their house. They mentioned that they don’t really need a truck, except for about three or so times a year when they very much do.
I think this is extremely common for people all over the place; they don’t need pickup trucks very often, but there are times when only a pickup truck will do. The thing about a pickup truck is it is an ability multiplier, and a truck is often a key component of being able to accomplish things that otherwise have nothing to do with trucks. Like, say, getting a lathe to your workshop to build things, or a pottery kiln or a lot of wood for a project. You may only need that truck for, say, an afternoon, but that single afternoon of truck use can transform your ability to create and build and do things for months or years.
Maybe you have a small boat, or, like me, a shitty canoe. They are useless unless you have a truck to get them to the water. Maybe a tree falls in your yard, and you need to clear out all the debris. Maybe your kid is going off to college. Maybe you’re throwing a party or a surprise Bar Mitzvah and you need to haul a bunch of folding tables and chairs. Maybe you told a date some elaborate lie about how you live that truck life, baby, and you need to keep the deception going?
Hell, maybe your car is in the shop for a week, and you just need a way to get two and from work? You don’t need a truck for that, but it’ll work!
There’s nothing but uses and reasons for a truck.
But these don’t happen every day. If you have a truck that’s not your daily driver, chances are that truck spends a lot of time sitting. So why not share it?
Just picture this: a group of households in your neighborhood – I’m guessing maybe a dozen at the high end, but who knows, more or less could likely work – get together to buy a used workhorse-type pickup truck. I think buying a used workhorse truck makes more sense than anything new, because this truck is for work. It has no need to be actually nice or pretty or even particularly comfortable, because it’s not for that. If you want a nice truck, buy yourself a nice truck. This is a communal truck.
Every household would pay a share of the initial cost, and there would be some sort of vote to find the “home base” for the truck. This home base would be the house of the person who would usually agree to store the truck, have it registered in their name (most states allow for some sort of group registration – here’s an example from the New York DOT), and would be responsible for making sure insurance and inspections and other legalities are up to date. In return, this person would be exempt from the fractional payments of insurance and maybe would get some sort of compensation for storing the vehicle.
You’re all adults, you’ll figure that out. If a neighborhood has an HOA, this is a perfect opportunity to actually have an HOA do something useful, for once, and the HOA could be the entity that registers/stores the truck.
Since we live in a modern age of computing machines that talk to one another, setting up something like a communal Google Calendar for scheduling the truck should be pretty easy; that’s part of why this may be the best time in history to communally own a truck. All the tools to manage truck scheduling are free and available on everyone’s phone!
Maybe keys could be stored in some sort of lock box in an outdoor location? Or on the truck itself?
I know people can rent trucks from Home Depot or U-Haul or whatever, but let’s be honest – it’s a pain in the ass, and it almost always costs more than you thought it would. It’s not the same as having access to a simple calendar to sign up for use of a truck walking distance from your house.
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I got a Home Depot Transit 350 HD, ask me anything ???????????? pic.twitter.com/Wv8bz0A1eY
— The Autopian (@the_autopian) September 23, 2023
[Ed Note: I would love to skip the HD visit and just grab the communal truck keys – Pete]
Truck co-owners would need to agree to some basic, obvious rules, like fill the truck up with gas when you’re done with it, clean it if you get it filthy, if something breaks from what you did, fix it, that kind of thing.
Regular maintenance and larger repairs would be communally paid for, of course, and hopefully wouldn’t be that terrible, since everything would be split about ten ways or so. Or, even better, members of the community fix the truck themselves (if the skills and/or will to try are there) together, which can help people learn how to work on cars, as well as a way for people to get to know one another.
Are there risks? Sure! Lots of them, probably! Someone could be a dick and stop paying their share (easy to fix, they’re out of the group), someone could get in a wreck, it could get used in a crime of some sort, all of these are possible but I think the worst possibilities are pretty unlikely. I believe the benefits of communal truck ownership outweigh these risks. These people are your neighbors, after all! If you’re that worried about them doing terrible shit, you have bigger problems, I think.
Why isn’t this more of a thing? I’m sure there are places where this does exist, and where it’s working well. I bet there are also stories from people who have tried this and it was a disaster. Again, I still think this is a net positive.
In fact, it should be something people look for when buying a house – a Zillow listing should have a section that mentions something like OPTION FOR COMMUNAL TRUCK OWNERSHIP, and it’s a nice perk if that’s checked.
See, this is the scale where communal things could actually work: small groups, a clear, common benefit, saves money for the people involved, builds community camaraderie – I just don’t see a downside here.
Trucks should be shared, and the best place to do so is right where you live. If this is communism, then I’ll be Karl Fucking Marx, tooling around in my battered but beautiful old F-150.
Nice thought, terrible idea. People are too much jerks. Constant arguments about maintenance, choice of mechanic, needed repairs, truck condition and parking location. I’m on my HOA board. Got a complaint last week about Christmas decorations. Didn’t like the neighbors decorations; wanted HOA to make them take them down. A community truck would be a disaster.
Good idea, but if the example of the shared garden tools in the neighborhood community garden are any indication, this wouldn’t end well.
Oh, do I wish to return to those blissful days of youthful naivete. Days when I believed that If I was a nice guy to everybody around me, they would all be nice to me. Days when I believed that all good deeds went appreciated and sometimes even rewarded. Days when I believed that if I left every situation better than or equal to when I eneterd it, others would fo the same. Well, time, age and experience have all conspired to destroy that utopian outlook on the world. There are some really good people in the world, but they are not as easy to find as you might think. When you do find one, they will generaly be as wary of you for all the same reasons. The concept of a community guarantees that there will be some of these good people, but also some that are hellbent on ruining whatever well intentioned construct the good people try to build.
I’ve been wishing for a local community truck for years now. Alas, it would fall victim to the tragedy of the Commons, where no one cares enough and everyone abuses it because it’s someone else’s responsibility. Tragically, in the US, the only reliable way to do this, in most communities outside of truly insular places where cooperation is a daily way of life, is capitalism. A business owns and maintains the trucks, you rent them, and you’re on the hook to make sure they don’t get too banged up. The incentives line up and it mostly just works.
Seen this with the work trucks where I once worked 40 years ago. Always on empty, dirty as can be plus the fast food bags and wrappers tucked under & behind the seat. Flat spare tire, lug wrench missing, side view mirror broken, etc. No thanks I’ll just keep my own truck.
Love the optimism on display here Torch. Let’s see what this schedule would look like, hypothetically.
Not sure what your neighborhood looks like, but this isn’t far off from mine. I’m just leaving out the part where one of those “made up” people would be constantly bugging me to log them into the schedule because they just don’t “get” computers.
Ah, the ol’ tragedy of the commons. Give people a communal resource and they will abuse it till it is destroyed.
My previous boss was an architect with an office in the old part of town. His neighbor left his ratty old utility trailer out front of their $500k turn of the century houses. My boss would just “borrow” the trailer any time he needed plywood from Lowes or whatever.
I think it’s easier to just make friends with someone who has a truck. Treat it like you borrowed it and return it with a full tank of gas even if it was empty when you picked it up. Do that a couple times and there’s never a problem borrowing it again. Plus, sometimes it comes with extra hands and more hands make light work.
It may be better to know someone with a truck than to own a truck.
Eh, if other pickup owners are anything like me, I’d MUCH rather just go help them rather than just loan out my pickup. Makes me nervous loaning out my 30 year old LONG pickup to somebody.
We have a really good trailer rental system here. Its like $45(nzd) for the day, you pick one up from the petrol station then return it, you normally have a selection from caged, to covered, to small moving trailers. Its brilliant, many houses don’t have room for a trailer in their driveways, so it works super well. Pick ups are of course very common here, but they are always dual cabs with small trays, normally covered in some sort of hard cover or canopy reducing the vertical usefullness. It makes life super easy knowing that you can have a trailer whenever you need one.
A long time ago, someone said to me “When you use this, treat it like someone else owns it”. That really stuck with me over the years because as I got older, I got to see how people took care of their own shit and realized the majority are clueless and just DGAF. I can only imagine what they would do to a truck they have limited financial or emotional investment in.
A community truck? Community anything…in this day and age? You need a really special place and group of people to pull that off. Guaranteed, someone will break it and pretend they had no idea. Keep it for more days then they were supposed to. Leave it with no gas. You name it, it will happen. And who takes care of it? Like REALLY takes care of it.
Call me pessimistic but I think the majority would implode rather quickly.
I think the reason it feels that way is because of how few communal resources we have these days. Something like a neighborhood truck might lead to some problems and conflicts, but resolving those as a community is a good thing for society beyond just the truck. All it’d take is a logbook, someone who holds the keys and a few neighbors paying attention at any time, then any misbehavior or irresponsibility gets handled by the community. It’s just simple small community problem solving and cooperation that we don’t engage in anymore and is sorely missing from people’s lives. It’s gotta start somewhere or we’re just going to keep getting more and more insular and antisocial.
I’ve made it a point to try and talk to my neighbors as much as I can because having that community is really nice and is something that is missing in recent years. My parents knew everyone on the block as did their parents. I have pictures of my grandfather and a couple of neighbors all up on top of the house putting in a dormer up.
Storage should work like an engine hoist—the last person to use it keeps it at their house. Otherwise, this is a pretty damn good idea.
I’m going to be selling my truck soon because I hardly use it as a truck, but I’m hoping to sell it to a friend because it’d be nice to be able to borrow it occasionally. Same idea.
We had a shared cargo trailer with another family and would loan it out. Eventually we bought out the other family when they moved. It can work, but there definitely were scheduling challenges occasionally.
I could see a trailer share working okay. Orders of magnitude fewer moving parts, and the insurance situation is simplified.
This can (and frequently does) work between a small group of friends, neighbours, or business owners, but usually comes down to trust built up over time, and careful vetting of the parties involved. Even then, many of these arrangements fall apart when something actually goes wrong- And that’s between people with good intentions.
Expand this unilaterally to an entire neighborhood of people, and you’re guaranteed to have at least one ‘bad actor’, who may not even be the person you expect… So what then, exclude them? There goes the inclusivity factor.
If you decide to forge ahead as a community and accept the risks, you need to have a lawyer draw up a robust agreement that includes provisions for handling damage and maintenance. Then, you need someone to manage this agreement, with enough standing to hold members accountable. Yikes, you’ve just become a non-for profit rental agency. Who registers and insures the vehicle? Who is liable if something goes wrong? What standard of maintenance /damage is acceptable? What is the organizational structure to even make these decisions? How do you elect the board of directors?
As someone who has been involved in a few tangential organizations like a lake association, a cooperative craft studio, and volunteered at a community bike shop, I think these kind of grassroots ventures are fantastic, and I’m always rooting for their success.
That said, I think id rather shit in my hands and clap than nit pick the maintenance of a vehicle with a dozen non-professionals. This is a part of life where I’m very content with everyone making do with their own private property, and U-Haul.
I mean yeah, inclusivity is something that you have to maintain, if anyone goes against the spirit then they get excluded unless they make meaningful amends with the rest of the community. If your friend borrows your lawn mower and returns it with a fucked up blade and no gas, it’s sensible to exclude them from that kindness if they aren’t willing to make changes to their behavior. That’s the kind of community interactions that are lacking from people’s lives that make them behave that way in the first place and why that behavior seems to be endemic these days in society. We have to claw back that sort of social structure that helps to prevent antisocial behavior across all facets of our lives these days.
I agree, and it’s why I feel something like this should stay informal between individuals- with the lender free to give out or withhold their possessions on a case-by-case basis. That can happen within a community where people encourage a general spirit of helping each other out.
Once you scale something like this up into the arrangement Torch is proposing, you have to start looking at it from more of a macro standpoint. Damage and incidents are inevitable, even from use by the ‘good neighbours’. It becomes the organization’s responsibility to set up a framework to deal with it. Kicking people out is of little use after an incident, you need them around to help bear the costs.
To me, it makes sense to socialize stuff like libraries, hospitals, roads, etc.. But I’m not sure it makes sense for pickup trucks.
> I think id rather shit in my hands and clap
Pure poetry
What makes this better than Turo?
I was thinking about this as well. Maybe it needs to be a neighborhood business venture where a truck is bought for the primary purpose of being rented on Turo and the secondary purpose of being shared among the neighborhood. Income from rentals could offset maintenance costs and days could be blocked off for neighborhood use.