Car-sharing good for wallet

In the first-ever North American one-way car-sharing impact study, the Transportation Sustainability Research Center (TSRC) reveals that “car2go” has a substantive impact on improving urban mobility and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. According to the University of California Berkeley, the three-year study, led by TSRC co-director Susan Shaheen and research engineer Elliot Martin, is the first-ever analysis looking specifically at one-way car-sharing in North America and its impact on mobility. TSRC teamed up with car2go in five cities – Calgary, Alberta; San Diego, California; Seattle, Washington; Vancouver, British Columbia; and Washington, D.C., to gather data, clearly showing one-way car-sharing reduces the number of cars travelling on city roads and occupying parking spaces on city streets. “Our exhaustive, three-year research effort into one-way car-sharing reveals that car2go vehicles result in fewer privately-owned vehicles on the road, fewer vehicle miles travelled and a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions,” says Shaheen. Car-sharing, the shared use of a vehicle fleet by members for trip-making on a per trip basis, has been gaining traction around the world, but researchers wanted to know more about the effects it was having. For the study, Shaheen and Martin looked specifically at one-way car-sharing, which enables members, who pay by the minute, to begin and end a trip at different locations – either throughout a free-floating zone or station-based model with designated parking locations. The study, which gathered data from nearly 9,500 North American car-sharing users, revealed the following:

• Between 2 to 5 percent of the car-sharing population sold a vehicle because of sharing availability;
• Another 7 to 10 per cent did not acquire a vehicle because of sharing access;
• Each car-sharing vehicle removes from 7 to 11 vehicles from city roads;
• One to three private vehicles were sold across the five cities per car-sharing vehicle;
• In total, car2go took an estimated 28,000-plus vehicles off of the road and reduced parking demand;
• There was a 6 to 16 per cent reduction in vehicle miles traveled (VMT) across the study population (average of 11 percent); and
• a 4 to 18 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across the study population (average 10 percent).

Estimates suggest that the one-way car-sharing service prevented between 10 to 29 million VMT per year per city, depending on assumptions of suppressed mileage, which in-turn removed between 5.5 to 12.7 metric tons of GHG emissions per car-sharing vehicle annually (on average). The average age of vehicles car-sharing members reported selling averaged 14.4 years across all the cities, thus helping to remove more polluting vehicles with older emission systems from city streets.