Carsharing - Description

Description

The principle of carsharing is that individuals gain the benefits of private cars without the costs and responsibilities of ownership. Instead a household accesses a fleet of vehicles on an as-needed basis. Carsharing may be thought of as organized short-term car rental.

Carsharing has sprung up in different parts of the world and operations are organized in many different ways in different places. Sizes of organizations vary from one shared car, and only a handful of sharers to organizations that serve a complete urban area.

Carsharing differs from traditional car rentals in the following ways:

• Carsharing is not limited by office hours
• Reservation, pickup, and return is all self-service
• Vehicles can be rented by the minute, by the hour, as well as by the day
• Users are members and have been pre-approved to drive (background driving checks have been performed and a payment mechanism has been established)
• Vehicle locations are distributed throughout the service area, and often located for access by public transport.
• Insurance: state minimum liability insurance (only $5000 in some states), comprehensive and collision insurance. They do not provide uninsured, under-insured or personal injury protection insurance.
• Fuel costs are included in the rates.
• Vehicles are not serviced (cleaning, fueling) after each use, although certain programs such as Car2Go continuously clean and fuel their fleet

Some carshare operations (CSOs) cooperate with local car rental firms, in particular in situations where classic rental may be the cheaper option.

Carsharing can provide numerous transportation, land use, environmental, and social benefits. Neighborhood carsharing is often promoted as an alternative to owning a car where public transit, walking, and cycling can be used most of the time and a car is only necessary for out-of-town trips, moving large items, or special occasions. It can also be an alternative to owning multiple cars for households with more than one driver. A long-term study of City CarShare members by Robert Cervero, Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, found that 30 percent of households that joined sold a car; others delayed purchasing one. Transit use, bicycling, and walking also increased among members. A study of driving behavior of members from major carsharing organizations found an average decline in 27% of annual VKT.

Carsharing is generally not cost-effective for commuting to a full-time job on a regular basis. Most carsharing advocates, operators and cooperating public agencies believe that those who do not drive daily or who drive less than 10,000 kilometers (about 6,200 statute miles) annually may find carsharing to be more cost-effective than car ownership. But variations of 50% on this figure are reported by operators and others depending on local context. If occasional use of a shared vehicle costs significantly less than car ownership, this makes automobile use more accessible to low-income households.

Carsharing can also help reduce congestion and pollution. Replacing private automobiles with shared ones directly reduces demand for parking spaces. The fact that only a certain number of cars can be in use at any one time may reduce traffic congestion at peak times. Even more important for congestion, the strong metering of costs provides a cost incentive to drive less. With owned automobiles many expenses are sunk costs and thus independent of how much the car is driven (such as original purchase, insurance, registration and some maintenance).

Successful carsharing development has tended to be associated mainly with densely populated areas such as city centers and more recently university and other campuses. There are some programs (mostly in Europe) for providing services in lower density and rural areas. Low-density areas are considered more difficult to serve with carsharing because of the lack of alternative modes of transportation and the potentially larger distance that users must travel to reach the cars.

People who have joined carsharing sell either their primary, secondary, or another off-hand car, after using the service. This reduces the cost of transportation per month by an average of $135 – $435, based on University of Berkeley's Research in 2008.