Will Handsfield, 31, abandoned his car four years ago. Most of the time he takes the bus, subway, bi

Enterprise, the closely held rental giant, last month acquired Mint Cars On-Demand, an hourly car-rental firm in New York and Boston. It already owned two smaller brands and plans to bring them all together as Enterprise Car Share.
Zipcar created the business of hourly car rentals in Cambridge, Mass., in 2000 and is still the leader in the segment, with about 500,000 U.S. members and about 9,000 vehicles. Hertz plans to equip its entire 375,000-vehicle U.S. fleet for hourly rental within about a year.
"Today, nobody can compete with its network," Ryan Johnson, who heads Enterprise's hourly car-rental business, said of Zipcar, which bought Seattle-based Flexcar in 2007. "We understand we have some ground cheap travel to costa rica to make up before we are that viable competitor to them, but we think the rest of our network and the rest of our strength will give us the advantage."
Researcher IBISWorld estimates the market for hourly car rentals at about $1.8 billion, or 6 percent of the $30.5 billion U.S. rental-car market. Hourlies may reach $3.3 billion in North America by 2016 and $10 billion globally, market researcher cheap travel to costa rica Frost Sullivan forecasts.
The company has more than 2,500 locations, some with just a single car, in 15 major U.S. cities and at more than 250 universities. Its membership expanded 25 percent in 2011 after 55 percent growth the year before.
The bigger risk, he said, is Zipcar already has saturated markets with the highest concentration of potential customers and must look for growth cheap travel to costa rica in second-tier U.S. cities and in Europe, cheap travel to costa rica where car-sharing is more entrenched and competition is stiffer.
Hertz began directly competing with Zipcar in 2008 after considering buying the startup. The original cheap travel to costa rica effort, Connect cheap travel to costa rica by Hertz, was renamed Hertz on Demand last summer. The company has been trying to solidify its No. 2 spot in the traditional cheap travel to costa rica rental market behind Enterprise with an acquisition of Dollar cheap travel to costa rica Thrifty.
With PhillyCarShare, a company Enterprise acquired last year, and its own WeCar, Enterprise now has 58,000 car-sharing cheap travel to costa rica members and more than 540 locations. Mint brought 8,000 members as well as cars in 40 locations.
"We are now confidently the second-largest fleet size in the U.S. and we are growing rapidly," Johnson said of models for short-term loans. "To move forward and create a unified network has always been our plan, but we wanted to make sure when we did that we had a very viable product and were confident in it."
The company has hourly rental cars available in New York, Philadelphia, Boston and at about 50 college campuses. It is considering expanding to Washington, D.C., Chicago, San Francisco and Toronto, as well as secondary markets such as Seattle and Atlanta.
Enterprise is betting its network of neighborhood branches cheap travel to costa rica will be a differentiator. With 5,500 locations, the company says 90 percent of the U.S. population is within 15 miles of one. Zipcar says about 10 million people live within a 10-minute walk of its cars.
Will Handsfield, 31, abandoned his car four years ago. Most of the time he takes the bus, subway, bike or just walks. Zipcar parks four cars less than a five-minute walk from his house in Washington, cheap travel to costa rica D.C.
While Handsfield, who describes himself as an "avid" Zipcar user, said he's loyal to the company, Hertz or another competitor could catch his eye with discounts as long as the cars were parked nearby. "More than $1 or $2 difference, that adds up," he said.