Car sharing clubs have made their first
tentative inroads, some very tentative first steps, into North America.
This outreach of a trend that started in western Europe, where it is somewhat more
advanced, may portend good news for public transit in the future. It has the potential of
taking cars off the road, along with lowering congestion, pollution, and the parking
problems often encountered in densely populated urbanized regions. Besides, the collective
use of cars cuts ownership costs drastically and makes a lot of sense in view of the fact
that most cars are used for an hour or less per day by a sole occupant.
Car sharing--which substitutes a fleet of vehicles to which households have access on
an as-needed basis for individual ownership--may be thought of as a form of short-term car
rental. The fleets may be owned by local clubs, public transit operators, or by private
car rental firms. Generally, participants pay a modest fixed yearly charge for which they
get an electronic access card, and they are billed a mileage and time-based usage charge
each time they borrow a vehicle.
At last report, the first U.S. car sharing club is operating in Portland, Ore., with
around 200 members. Canada is a little ahead, with clubs in five cities (Montreal, Quebec,
Toronto, Vancouver, and Victoria, B.C.) with a cumulative total of more than 1,500 members
and more than a hundred cars. In Seattle, a movement is afoot to build on the Portland
experience, and a club there may be operating by the end of the year.
In the United Kingdom, Britain's first "City Car Club" was launched in
Edinburgh, Scotland, early this year as a joint initiative of the city council and a local
car rental company. The club has a special relationship with a car-free housing
subdivision in which residents have pledged not to own a private car as long as they live
in the project.
More recently, a car rental firm in Vienna and the Austrian Automobile Club climbed
aboard, and the club now offers members a fleet of cars at about 50 locations throughout
the country. Most club members are located in Vienna, with the westernmost state of
Vorarlberg, next to Switzerland, in second place.
The European car sharing movement originated in Switzerland in 1987 and spread rapidly
to neighboring Germany. At this point, Switzerland has some 20,000 regular car share
members who use about 1,000 vehicles, located in more than 300 localities throughout the
country. The cars are available around the clock in more than 600 pickup locations and can
be reserved with a single call to a central number.
The public transit authority of Zurich, Switzerland's largest city, is cooperating with
a private car rental firm to have the cars available to transit pass holders at the major
multimodal rail terminals.
In Germany, the two largest car clubs, those of Hamburg and Berlin, joined forces last
year. The combined club claims a fleet of about 300 cars and over 5,000 members.
Several German city administrations, including those of Ludwigshafen and Bremen, have
allowed their departments to join shared car clubs and have given up a few of their own
cars as a result, reducing administrative costs to taxpayers. The German Institute for
Urban Research is monitoring these experiments.
The European Car Sharing Association, established in 1991 as a continent-wide advocacy
group, recently reported a total membership of 50,000 users with more than 2,500 cars at
more than 700 locations.
Italy reports the most recent nationwide car-sharing project: nine cities (Rome, Milan,
Turin, Modena, Brescia, Udine, Florence, Bologna, and Venice) have joined forces under the
leadership of the government's Energy and Environment Agency (ENEA). The project, a
partnership between ENEA and the European Union, has as its primary aim to cut atmospheric
pollution in cities and will use electric cars exclusively.
Italian Environment Minister Edo Ronchi announced that each participating city will
receive the equivalent of $4.5 million to launch the car sharing program in cooperation
with local sponsors. Each participating city is expected to provide fleets of at least 500
electric vehicles.
At the organizing meeting in Rome last December, ENEA spokesman Dario Malosti said that
in the nine Italian cities that are launching car sharing programs in 1999, there will
be the same rules: same fees, same smart cards, the same smart system of counting the
kilometers traveled."
From the public transit perspective, research studies completed in Germany and
Switzerland have determined that car sharing becomes economical for owners who drive their
cars less than 7,000 miles per year. The average car sharer uses public transit almost
twice as much as a private car owner, and for every car club, five privately-owned cars on
average are taken out of circulation. Surfing the Internet with "car sharing" as
the search term recently yielded an astounding 700-plus entries from locations around the
world. Interested people can start by visiting http://www.carsharing.org.
Return To International Focus
Some of these pages may include links to documents in the Adobe PDF format. Please download the Adobe PDF reader if you have not already done so.
