The city of Paris is getting ready to embark upon one of the most aggressive car-sharing programs in history to tame the French capital’s endemic traffic. Named Autolib, after the bicycle sharing program Vélib, the initiative, which is the idea of Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë, would see the swift rollout of 3,000 electric vehicles placed at 700 stations throughout the city.

The hope is that by getting Parisians out of their own cars and into shared rides, the city’s gridlock can be calmed and air pollution and vehicle emissions will be abated. If successful the Autolib program could reduce carbon emissions in the city by as much as 22,000 tons per year, according to Businessweek. Members would pay 15 euros per month with an additional 7 euros per half hour the car is out. The real deal sealer could be free parking, which is one of the most hectic things about owning and operating a car in Paris.

“Driving in and around Paris is a nightmare,” writes Thomas Hillenbrand in Der Spiefel. “There are never any parking spaces available anyway, and on the Peripherique inner ring road it’s possible to wait for over an hour in traffic without having moved a hundred yards forward.”

The common metric for car sharing programs is that each shared vehicle in a fleet can take 15 private cars off the road. With a fleet of 3,000 cars, Autolib may reduce traffic volume by 45,000 cars.

Already we’ve seen the popularity of car sharing programs that rely on conventional, internal combustion engines and hybrids where available. One of the advantages with fleet-wide adoption of electric vehicles is that they can be stored in a central location and charged on a set schedule. While car-sharing for commuter purposes does not present an ideal set of circumstances, it stands to reason that the hours when people don’t normally drive, such as the middle of the night, would be the best time to recharge batteries.

However, the possibility of vandalism and the all to frequent “problem of the commons” has some planners worried. When drivers don’t own the car, the tendency is to be more lax about cleanliness and damage than they might otherwise be if they had to drive the same car day in and day out.

From Der Spiegel:

Of the 20,000 Vélib bicycles, nearly half have been destroyed. The project will turn out to be an expensive experiment for the city and the operators if the far more valuable electric cars end up in the Seine or dying somewhere along the roadside due to lack of range. That’s why, according to sources in the Paris administration, the companies bidding for the project have been asked to develop appropriate technical security measures.

Zipcar, a popular car sharing company in the U.S., charges member’s credit cards automatically for any damage that occurs during their rental. The autolib program is likely to be underwritten by the French government, with a wider pool of users than a private service, so this may make collection more difficult and provide less incentive for drivers to behave.