The city is saving tens of millions of dollars on its fleet of more than 25,000 vehicles by using technology purchased from Zipcar, officials said Monday.
Combined with other measures, including cutting the number of service garages from 47 to 37, the move will save taxpayers about $415 million by 2016, the officials added.
The most innovative of the fleet-reduction measures is a pilot project quietly begun nine months ago that allows employees to reserve unused government cars by utilizing the same software as Zipcar, the popular car-sharing service.
As a result, the total number of vehicles — which includes everything from garbage trucks to police cars — is down to 25,855.
That’s the lowest number of the Bloomberg administration.
It was only a few years ago, in 2008, that the fleet peaked at 29,831.
About 6,600 city vehicles are in the sharing program.
“The transformation we are recognizing today, which treats the city’s fleet as one common resource rather than a dozen separate operations, has fundamentally changed the way the city operates the largest municipal fleet in the country,” said Deputy Mayor Cas Holloway.
Earlier, in 2010, the city made a deal to use Zipcars to replace part of the city’s fleet. Zipcar charges the city a bargain rate of $5 an hour.
While that continues, inspectors at the Health, Transportation and Citywide Administrative Services agencies earlier this year also began using Zipcar’s technology to schedule times to use the city’s own cars for their rounds.
With both the Zipcar rentals and the upgraded city fleet empowered with the rental firm’s technology, officials can track how far each staffer has traveled and can check whether city employees are following their assigned routes.
“We know where people are,” explained one official.
Bloomberg made the announcement at a new NYPD service shop in Manhattan that used to be operated by the Transportation Department but had extra capacity that was going unused.
“The consolidation of fleet services is not only saving taxpayers money, it’s making them safer, too,” said Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.
“The close proximity of the new garage to police facilities allows us to get our vehicles serviced and back out on patrol faster than before.”