The website before I filled out all the forms said it might take "a few hours" before approval. After I filled out all the forms and paid the money, it said insurance approval might take "2-3 business days", at which I ಠ_ಠ'ed a little bit (see below) but then
So the most pressing reason for doing this is to have an option open to use a car to get some of my moving done; I have some books and stuff that need to get from my office to my apartment, and I am considering just taking a day to preemptively (the "preemptive" bit would have been made impossible by the 2-3 business days above) ferry a mattress up to nyc myself (the roundtrip is conveniently just about the daily zipcar mileage limit) so that there is no "homeless gap" introduced by the 2-8 day time that it apparently takes the professional movers to move my stuff. If I had known it was that long in the first place, I think I would have just UHauled it up myself. Not that it's necessarily an unreasonable amount of time if they are glomming together different people's stuff in one big trip or something, but since I have relatively little stuff, I think it wasn't necessarily the best choice. But heck, it's already been scheduled and paid for and stuff, and at least I'll get out of having to *pack* a bunch of stuff myself, so I might as well take advantage of that.
And separately it seems like $5/mo and $9/hr is a reasonably affordable price to pay for occasional car use. Other people seem to find it useful. I'll see if I actually find it useful in the next year, and just not renew if not. It's a $60 gamble over the space of a year. Seems prudent enough.