Sharing is Caring

Sharing a shower is one of the most sexually tantalizing, revealing, and cleansing things you can do with another person. Feeling the heat from their body as you lather them up with soap, unsure whether the hot steam that is filling the shower is coming from the water or your passion. Showering is a wonderful experience that should be shared with many people simultaneously. At least this is what was advocated by Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels in 2006 as one thing you can do to be more sustainable. Sustainability is the acknowledgement that we have limited resources and we must use them more efficiently. Sharing resources is fundamental to this goal however it poses many problems for our liability worried society.
It has been suggested many times that Lewis & Clark provide a car-sharing program for students. Instead of needing to have a car on campus for the once a week trip to the grocery shore or the few times you need to get anywhere besides Sellwood or Downtown you could just borrow a car from the school. Like many good sustainable ideas car sharing is huge over in Europe but in America the idea of sharing a car poses many insurmountable challenges, mainly the threat of who would be liable. LC currently loans out SUV’s to student groups however getting an insurance company to cover loaning out cars to college students on a daily basis is much more difficult. While it makes perfect sense for our community to have a program like this the fear that someone is going to sue the college for ten million dollars because the tires weren’t correctly inflated and they got into an accident makes it a hard sell.
This summer I was involved in forming the LC Bike Library. Students could check out bikes from campus safety for free and ride them around for the day. The bikes were paid for with the left over SEED budget and were given regular tune-ups and an overhaul by the bike co-op. Before biking, people had to sign a waiver saying that no one at LC could be responsible for anything that happened while riding the bike. Over the course of the summer over 60 students and staff used these unadvertised bikes. The program was not only successful at making biking more accessible but one of the most exciting things for me was how into it the campus safety officers got. Instead of writing people up they were providing a service. However just like with car sharing, bike sharing poses many liabilities.
One day in the middle of August I got a call saying that someone had crashed one of the bikes and was in the hospital. While the accident was the result of an inexperienced bike rider I still felt tremendously guilty. Was I responsible because I had made this program available to people? The individual ended up being okay but what if she had died? Immediately after the accident I told campus safety to put a hold on the program. Since then they have contacted me about restarting it but I personally I have found little motivation to put more energy into the program.
While sharing a shower is fun and sexy, sharing things like cars and bikes can be dangerous. It is difficult to judge how to best prevent accidents from happening. How many tests and waivers do you need to make people go through before you can root out everyone who is going to pose a liability? Or do we need to just accept that the liability is there and people are going to get into bike and car accidents no matter where they get them from? While I wholeheartedly support the sharing our resources I have come to realize that it is not as easy as just giving people the opportunity to share. There is a certain fear of each other that prevents us from always offering a lending hand, especially to strangers. It is often difficult to judge if this fear is well founded. However I still believe that controlling this fear is vital to create the foundation for a sustainable society. For now I’m just sticking to sharing showers but perhaps someday I’ll wake up and feel like more people need to ride bikes and it just makes sense for us to share.