Britain's
First City Car Club Planned for Edinburgh To Tie In
with Car-Free Housing Areas
Edinburgh, Scotland--Britain's first
City Car Club is expected to be launched in Edinburgh early this year as a joint
initiative of the City Council and a local car rental company. The scheme is designed to
tie in with Edinburgh's car-free housing subdivisions, where residents pledge not to own
private cars while living in the housing project.
A spokesman for the initiative told a news conference,
"The car club shifts the onus from owning a car to renting one. Members pay an annual
membership fee to join the club, and then pay by the hour for access to a car for hire
which is parked in their local neighborhood."
The system originated in Switzerland in the early 1990s
and spread rapidly to neighboring Austria and Germany. At this point, Switzerland has
about 20,000 regular car share customers, using about 900 vehicles located in more than
300 localities throughout the country. The cars are available around the clock in some 600
pickup lots and can be reserved with a single call over a central number.
In Germany, the two largest car clubs, those of Berlin and
Hamburg, joined forces this past summer and are now a single company with a stock of about
250 vehicles, including several electric cars.
In Berlin, they are located at more than 40 distribution
points, each of which has between two and seven pickup spaces. The cars can be booked 24
hours a day, and club members receive a smart card that gives them access to car key
lockers. The Hamburg stock of about 100 cars can be picked up at 45 lots, and the one-time
club entry fee was recently reduced to the equivalent of $30.
In the six European countries where car clubs are already
active, total membership is currently estimated at about 40,000, using a fleet of several
thousand vehicles in several hundred cities and towns. Participating countries include
Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland. As noted at the
outset, Britain is preparing to join this year.
Since the trend started with a few hundred members and a
dozen cars in the early 1990s, club membership has almost doubled every year. According to
several research studies completed in Germany and Switzerland, car sharing becomes
economical for owners who drive their car for less than 7,000 miles per year.
The average car sharer uses public transit almost twice as
much as a car owner, and for every car club vehicle, five privately owned cars on average
are taken out of circulation.
Information on car clubs is available on the Internet at http://www.carsharing.org.
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