It’s 2009 and who hasn’t heard of green transportation ?Although the green movement using transportation can be traced back to the horse and buggy days, and certainly the Amish community travel about as green as can be, it can be reasonably stated that the modern era of the greening of transportation began in the mid 60’s. The beginning of green services. Up until that time, no one paid all that much attention to burning fossil fuels since gasoline was incredibly cheap, but in Amsterdam, a group called Provo tackled the problem of pollution and transportation availability all in one fell swoop.

They called it the White Bike Plan, and it entailed leaving painted white bikes around the city for anyone to use. One could get on a white bike, travel to where you needed to go, and then leave it there for the next person to use. What a green company, eh?

Provo wanted the city to have 20,000 white bikes available for use every year, which would have cut pollution and traffic congestion in the city. They wanted to couple their White Bike plan by closing down Amsterdam to all forms of internal combustion engine traffic, allowing electrically powered taxis to be maintained as semi-public transportation. But the government balked at this futuristic idea claiming that it was unworkable, without any real thought given to the matter.

Not to be denied, Provo themselves paid for and put into general use, 50 white bikes to prove it was a viable idea that would truly make a difference. The Amsterdam city officials went so far as to ban the white bike plan on grounds that unlocked bikes were illegal in the city. So to keep the plan going, Provo provided combination locks on all the white bikes, then painted the combinations for the locks on every bicycle!

This idea was too good, and it actually caught on. The people began using these bikes and soon there weren’t enough to go around, and the plan grew from there. Today, the white bike is a fixture of Amsterdam, being computer chip monitored with their own stalls to be parked in. Proving once again that good ideas taken up by the people will always succeed.

To that end is the Zipcar! It takes the white bike idea and updates it into an automobile. Zipcars are autos that are generally fuel efficient, such as hybrids, and once on the plan, you can use a Zipcar by the hour or by the day, paying as little as 7 dollars an hour.

Many major cities are beginning to get on the Zipcar wagon, and if interested you can get some info here. Needless to say, if treating a Zipcar as basic transportation to and from regular places like work and such, fuel consumption as well as pollution and traffic congestion would decrease, since one car would service so many people.

And that, folks, is the green way to drive, and it all began with the white bike of Amsterdam, all those years ago.