Luud Schimmelpennink (1935) is an Amsterdam born social inventor and industrial designer with special focus on sustainable transportation concepts. He first came into public view in the early 1960s through his association with the Provo, a Dutch counterculture (1965-1967) that sought to provoke the establishment with playful demonstrations. The initiative called 'witte fietsenplan' (the white bicycle plan) was one of them which saw him and colleagues collect several hundred bikes, paint them white and leave them around the city to be freely used.
In the mid-1960s, Schimmelpennink started work on a comparable concept called the 'witkar' (white car). Designed as environmentally friendly, non-polluting, safe and low speed city transport, the Witkar is a small three-wheeled electric car which was available on a subscription basis. The idea was that any person could take a Witkar, and leave it at the Witkar station closest to their destination in order to reduce parking problems in central Amsterdam. Using specially developed technology and a formal carshare operational program, the system was one of the first working carshare projects in the world.
Starting with a single station in early 1974, the project grew to provide daily service for over 4.000 registered users using 35 cars and five stations throughout the city. The ultimate target was 150 stations and 1,000 vehicles but as a result of never having gotten the system to work fully automated by computer combined with the lack of government support, the project was slowly phased out.
Though the project never succeeded in securing a lasting presence, I admire Schimmelpennink for developing this type of 'tangable social media'. Technologically, he was ahead of his time as is proven by the failing due to lagging computer performance. Looking at more recent sharing services, one can conclude that the immens development of mobile devices over the last decades has made such services much more tenable. This makes his efforts even more impressive.
As of 2007, Schimmelpennink is Managing Director of the Ytech Innovation Centre in Amsterdam as well as part of the Municipal District Council of Amsterdam Centrum.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luud_Schimmelpennink
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provo_(movement)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witkar