By Karen Klinger

Coming soon to parts of Cambridge with residential zoning and maybe even to your neighbor’s driveway: parking spots for Zipcars owned by the Boston-based vehicle-sharing company.

That, at least, could be the result of changes the city is considering making to zoning regulations that put a number of restrictions on where shared vehicles can park.

At a hearing May 19, the Cambridge Planning Board considered a petition by the city council to make it easier for Zipcar or any other car-sharing company (although only Zipcar now operates in the city) to find off-street parking spaces in both residential and business districts.

Suzanne Rasmussen, the city’s director of environmental and transportation planning, said the problem is that the “zoning code as it exists today does not say anything about car sharing.”

She said the proposed zoning amendment would, in effect, allow the law to catch up with the times. “It codifies what’s been happening, which is not currently allowed,” she said.

By that she meant some Zipcars already are parked in residential driveways and other places where they are not legally supposed to be. Currently, 200 vehicles are used by about 10,000 residents with Zipcar memberships.

When planning board member Charles Studen asked Rasmussen what would happen if the zoning ordinance were not amended, she replied, “That would not bode well for the future of car sharing.”

In a written summary, Assistant City Manager Beth Rubenstein said the zoning changes as proposed would apply to three main areas:

• In residential neighborhoods, vehicle-share parking would be allowed to take up to 10 percent of the total spaces in a lot or driveway, rounded up to the next whole number. So, buildings with one-to-10 spaces would be allowed one Zipcar spot, those with 11-to-20 spaces could have two spots, and so on.
• In non-residential zones, car-share parking in lots that serve businesses could take up to 10 percent of total spaces, with more allowed by a special permit.
• In commercial facilities where parking is available to the public for a fee, such as a parking garage, an unlimited number of spaces would be allowed for shared vehicles. “In theory, someone could take an entire garage and turn it into Zipcar parking,” Rasmussen said.

So far, the public response to the proposal has been mixed, with most of the concern focused on allowing Zipcar parking in residential areas. In letters and e-mails sent to the planning board and in testimony at the hearing, most people agreed that car-sharing was a good idea, but differed about whether the vehicles should be able to park outside of non-residential zones.

Joan Pickett, the president of the Mid-Cambridge Neighborhood Association (MCNA), said her members want to understand if—or why—allowing Zipcar parking is “consistent with what a residential neighborhood is all about.”

She said that last year, the owner of the lot where she parks her car tried to raise her rental rate by $95 a month, telling her that Zipcar would pay $225 a month for the space. “They backed off when I said that was illegal” because it was in a residential district, she said. But if the law changed, that would no longer be true.

A newsletter put out by the MCNA raises other concerns as well, including the specter of Zipcar users “coming and going at all hours of the day and night,” the possibility that upkeep of parking spaces could be problematic and the prospect of residents’ cars winding up on the street if spaces are lost to shared vehicles.

On the other side, there was praise for the concept of vehicle-sharing and the “easy and convenient Zipcar locations” from Janie Katz-Christy, who runs the Cambridge-based environmental organization Green Streets Initiative.

In the same vein, Steve Miller, founder of the local group Livable Streets Alliance, said the city should consider not only that shared cars have changed “the way people think about transportation” but that those who do not own vehicles have “needs that are every bit as legitimate” as those who do.

In the end, planning board members decided they needed more time to consider the zoning changes before making a recommendation to the city council, where the final decision rests. They will take up the issue again at their next meeting June 2.