ST. LOUIS - Zeynep Esin, a Washington University freshman, shuddered when recalling the misery Monday night of lugging bags from Target and Best Buy on the MetroLink and then back to her dorm room.

"It was really cold and dark," she said. "It was painful. I wished I had a car."

So she was excited to learn Tuesday that she soon will - sort of. In the next week or so, she, along with the 16,000 members of the Washington University community, will be able to "share" six hybrid cars - four Toyota Priuses and two Ford Escapes - that are already parked in designated spaces around campus.

The car-sharing program, which has no membership fees, will offer hourly rental rates of $10 to $12 and an overnight rate of $15, including gas. When Esin wants a car, all she will have to do is sign up for a time online and then use a car wand to open the car and get the key. No sales clerks or extra paperwork necessary.

The initiative, called WeCar, is being offered through Clayton-based Enterprise Rent-A-Car and is the St. Louis area's first venture into car sharing. The trendy phenomenon has become popular on college campuses and in dense urban areas like New York, Boston and Seattle, where many people do not own cars.

In a couple of weeks, Enterprise will announce the launching of a similar program for downtown St. Louis residents and commuters that will begin with nine Priuses to be shared around downtown.

Thomas Shrout, executive director of Citizens for Modern Transit, has been dreaming of bringing car sharing to St. Louis for about five years but has struggled to find ways to finance it.

Enterprise's interest in entering the market helped make it finally happen, he said. That, and a partnership that includes the citizens group, loft developers and architectural firms, will subsidize the program in the beginning, he said.

Shrout said he hopes to soon expand car sharing to other parts of town such as the Central West End, University City and Clayton.

Lisa Martini, a spokeswoman for Enterprise, said the company is not ready to roll out all of the details about the downtown program.

Enterprise's first venture into car sharing began about a year ago with plug-in hybrid cars at Google Inc.'s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. The initiatives at Washington U. and in downtown St. Louis, though, are the first efforts in its WeCar program. Martini said Enterprise will be looking to expand in other markets, too.

David Cole, chairman of the Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Center for Automotive Research, said in some ways car sharing is a good fit for Enterprise since its niche already is convenient locations in thousands of urban neighborhoods.

Cole said the announcement this fall that Zipcar and Flexcar - the two leading car-sharing companies - would merge gave more traction to the idea that car sharing can be a viable business.

There are more than a dozen car-sharing companies in the U.S. It is an even bigger hit in Europe.

Car sharing has had success in congested urban areas, where parking and insurance costs are very high, Cole said.

But will it work in markets like St. Louis?

"That's the real question," Cole said.

Car-sharing programs can also be found on more than 50 college campuses. St. Louis University and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are among those considering such initiatives.

At Washington University, the WeCar program adds to recent efforts to encourage public transportation. In August 2006, the university started giving all of its students and employees free and unlimited MetroLink and bus passes. It has been a very popular program, but some people were still hesitant to leave their cars at home, said Lisa Underwood, the school's director of parking and transportation.

"We repeatedly heard from people, 'I'd love to take the MetroLink to work, but what if I have a family emergency or a doctor's appointment?' " she said.

The other obvious audience for car sharing is students. Washington U. freshman cannot have cars on campus. And the upperclassmen often complain about parking costs and not being able to find a space in a nearby lot.

In the Washington U. program, the school is not subsidizing the program - only providing the parking spaces to Enterprise for free. Enterprise is providing the other startup costs and the fleet of cars and hopes to eventually turn a profit.

Monday was the first day students could sign up for WeCar, but the website had a few kinks that Enterprise was working to fix. The program has also not yet been well-publicized to students, many of whom were surprised to learn about it on Tuesday.

Eric Reif, a sophomore from Virginia, hadn't heard about it but thought it sounded useful. He said MetroLink and his two feet get him most of the places he needs to go. Still, MetroLink doesn't go everywhere - like to Schnuck's, which he walks to about once a month.

Wait, he asked, how much does taking out a car cost?

After hearing the rates and making sure they included gas, he seemed impressed.

"That's a pretty good deal," he said.