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The two leading flexible carsharing (one way/on demand) providers in Europe, DriveNow and Car@Go, have made a useful contribution to understanding the effects on members' transportation patterns with the release of a summary of a Joint Mobility Study By DriveNow and Car2Go.

The companies surveyed 2,881 members in Europe, all of whom had been members for at least 3 months and had used a vehicle in the past 30 days.  There was a fairly even distribution of ages from 18-50 and somewhat lower representation above that.  Over 2/3rd of those responding to the survey were male and about the same percentage had no children in the household (the report makes no statement whether the demographics are representative of the membership of the organizations).

Here's how members said they used vehicles:


Since the earliest days of Autolib' in Paris, there has been a concern that flexible carsharing would take passengers from public transport, and contribute to traffic on city streets.  Although the report indicates that carsharing members continue to use public transport and bicycling, there were some situations where users did subsitute flexible carsharing for a transit trips - when the transit trip would have been long or required several changes (echoing a finding from the early studies of City Carshare by Robert Cervero).   The main reason members gave for using flexible carsharing were when it was "the best and quickest way to reach my destination" (80%).  In addition to improved convenience over a transit trip, members used flexible carsharing if they believed the trip was less expensive than a taxi (62%) or if cycling was not convenient (43%).

Another concern about flexible carsharing has been that it might not have the same effect of motivating people to reduce the number of cars they own (and hence the temptation to use those cars) as traditional round-trip carsharing.  In the survey, 37% of members reported giving up a vehicle - of which more than 3/4s gave up their primary vehicle.  That's impressive!

Cars given up by flexible carsharing service members by year

What members said they liked about flexible carsharing were:

• I have the option to use a car spontaneously, if required (54%)
• The majority of my destinations are also accessible via other types of transport (53%)
• The upkeep of my own car was too expensive for me (45%)
• I hardly used my own car (42%)
• My life situation has changed (40%)

Regarding the growth of flexible carsharing, members indicated they would use it more, "If the cars were more reliably available in my area when I need one" (74%; which just about every user of flexible carsharing can testify is an occasional problem) and, "If I could use the cars for longer at a reasonable price, e.g. for weekend trips" (43%; an attraction of car ownership, as well as lower-priced traditional round trip carsharing).

Not too surprisingly, the report concludes that since the benefits of flexible carsharing are real, "upscaling the services would increase the beneficial effects" for cities.  I agree.

Industry report or not, I compliment both companies for providing a snapshot of their members.

(Sorry readers, I can't locate a link to the full report and charts online.  Here's the press release in German.)

My recent post showing updates on a classic graphic of transportation modes based on flexibility-distance received a lot of interest.  I recently came across another variation on this chart from Vincent Pilloy of the Paris-based transportation consultancy Innov360.



Unlike the other conceptualizations Pilloy's conceptualization includes walking and car pooling - useful additions to the chart, I think.  However, I'm not sure why P2P carsharing would be more useful for longer distance carsharing trips.

It was part of a blog post describing the various types of carsharing - round trip, one way station-based, free floating, etc.  Nicely done.

The success of carsharing clearly isn't just about how good the operator of the service is, it's also based on the overall balance and richness of the transportation environment of the city (and how the operator designs their service to fit into that environment.  Figuring out some way to "rate" cities on mobility seems like a key to greater understanding for policy makers, as well as a way for the carsharing operator to understand the city they're serving better.
This is interesting and useful attempt to define a set of criteria and develop ratings for 84 world cities in this full report The Future of Urban Mobility (PDF) report by Arthur D. Little for UITP organization.





The author's, François-Joseph Van Audenhove, Laurent Dauby. Oleksii Korniichuk, Jérôme Pourbaix
have divided the mobility factors into Maturity and Performance categores, and include both carsharing and bike sharing in the Maturity ratings.  (I wonder if they'd include Uber if they'd been writing the report in 2015?)  These factors were weighted and the index score calculated.

Of course one can quibble.  I would have substituted "smart PHONE penetration for "smart card penetration" and, ideally, some sort of land use rating to describe the proximity of neighborhood services that enable residents to not make trips at all.

While developing a index is can be useful, much can get lost in the process.  I noticed that Lost Angeles scored slightly better than Portland (my home town) but it's hard for me to imagine that LA really has a "better" urban transport system?

When I was first getting interested in carsharing, way back in 1996, I came across a wonderful graphic that really helped me understand the role of carsharing in transportation.  You've probably seen this graphic in numerous Powerpoints — which modes are best for which types of trips, based on the Distance of the trip and amount of Flexibility (time, destinations) needed during the trip.

I first saw the graphic on Eric Britton's foundational website and e-mail discussion group at World Carshare Consortium, which is still alive and well (as is Eric, who has created more website and discussion groups since then than I can keep track of!)  He told me that the original source, from 20 years earlier, didn't actually call it carsharing but the term "paratransit"(after all the term wasn't coined until 1987 when carsharing as we know it got started, almost simultaneously in Switzerland and Germany).  Somewhere along the line, the word Carsharing got substituted and the chart became history.

 (From Ron Kirby and Kisten Bhat: Para-transit: Neglected options for urban mobility, Urban Institute, 1974)

Well, that graphic was history, until now. But even carsharing evolves and now we have a new flavor - one-way/on-demand carsharing (e.g. Autolib, Car2Go, Enjoy, JoeCar), which has somewhat different trip characteristics.  So I was very pleased to find an updated version of this chart from Marco Viviani of CommunAuto, Montreal, showing the place for One-Way.

Something that Viviani's graphic does very nicely is to convey what those swirly black line arcs in the upper graphics represent - the possible overlap between modes.

One might argue that the One-Way bubble should really be a big elipse that also slightly overlaps with Public Transit, since the most recent evaluations show a slight decrease in transit trips by one-way users.  (But, for what it's worth, I would suggest this should not be a big concern since these are likely trips that would have been difficult to do on transit - either because of time and schedules or because of the number of changes required.)

I suppose one could include Uber, Lyft and Sidecar in the Taxi category, if you really wanted to update it.  The next question will be where autonomous cars belong on the chart?

Hope this is useful.

I'm regularly asked what are some other sources of information about the rapidly diversifying carsharing industry, so here are a couple of comments and a couple of places to spend some time.

First, the comments: if you're looking for operational data - hours per day of utilization, revenues, etc. - I'll tell you right now, there's ALMOST NOTHING on the web.  The reason is not hard to figure out: most of the companies are for-profit and don't want their competitors doing exactly what you're trying to do - reverse engineer their business model.  Nothing surprising about that, is there?  You can try to do a little reverse engineering from Zipcar's old SEC filings (pre/post IPO), City Carshare's tax forms (they're a nonprofit) on GuideStar, and the financial statements in Mobility Switzerland's annual report (they're a cooperative).

What is on the web has a lot to do with the growth of the industry and the demographics of members and trip patterns, as it relates to impacts on urban transportation.  Almost all of the information out there is about traditional round trip, station-based carsharing, since the first studies of one-way/on-demand carsharing and P2P carsharing are only now underway with results expected to start trickling out in the fall of 2014.

Finally, I would warn you you can spend a huge amount of time on the internet looking for information that just doesn't exist.  Trust me!

The starting point for any research on carsharing is the 2005 study by Adam Millard-Ball Carsharing Where and How It Succeeds.  This is the bible on round-trip station-based carsharing.  Fortunately, you can download the entire book for free from the Transportation Research Board here.  Really, start with this report whether you're a car rental company, a city government agency or a business major writing a report or a business plan.

TSRC — At the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at U.C. Berkeley, Dr. Susan Shaheen has been researching carsharing longer than anyone, and we are fortunate that she's got an academic home that has enabled her to research and publish so much about the evolution carsharing.  Reports by her, Eliot Martin and Adam Cohen are cited everywhere and for good reason.

Some other sources to check out:

Auto Rental News magazine — Chris Brown the editor of Auto Rental News realized early on the implications of carsharing on the rental car industry and started covering it.

CSA — The Car Sharing Association is a North American-based trade and advocacy group with a growing world-wide membership, which primarily serves as a forum for operators.  Some of the most useful current information is from the presentations from their 2013 conference here.

My Twitter feed — You'll quickly see that I Tweet a lot more than I write blog posts.  I cover current developments in carsharing and "new mobility", in general.  My most recent Tweets are to the right.

Carsharing.Net — Carsharing.net is curated by Autoshare (Toronto) CEO and Canadian carsharing pioneer Kevin McLaughlin and has a bunch of information, some new, some old including some "how to's" about starting a carshare from some of the pioneers. You can still download my 2004 TRB paper CarSharing - Start Up Issues and New Operational Models from the Carsharing.net website here.  People tell me is still a useful overview, even though the technology sectiion is woefully out of date.

Frost and Sullivan — Martyn Briggs and his band of researchers at Frost and Sullivan have produced a number of very interesting reports about carsharing and future of mobility and the automotive sector in both North America and Europe over the past few years.  Of course, they'd really like to sell you the full reports.  Search their site for the latest press releases here.

CommunAuto — Special mention should be made of the extensive bibliography of both French and English research reports on carsharing, starting pre 1981 and extending to 2005.  This is a gold mine for history buffs.




For international research you mostly have to go to consultants like me or hope you find something useful at the websties of trade associations in various countries.

World Carshare Forum — Eric Britton has been interested in carsharing even long than I have and has been an inspiration to pioneers in the industry through the World CarShare Forum.  But as carsharing has become well-established he's broadened his interests into more general sustainable mobility topics.  He's tireless in just about every medium imaginable, Facebook, Linked In, etc. Well, worth a read.

CarPlus — The CarPlus Trust in the UK is another go-to source for English-langauge information about "car clubs" in the UK ("carsharing in the Queen's English is what we Colonists call "carpooling").  They're an umbrella organization, setting standards and promoting the car club idea all over the British Isles and their best practice guides and annual report of car clubs is a model that every cities and, indeed, other countries should emulate. You'll also find references to reports by Dr. Scott LeVine of the Royal Auto Club Foundation in the Resources section, such as his recent Car Rental 2.0.

BCS — Bundesverband Car Sharing (Federal Association of Car Sharing) headed by long-time carsharing researcher/advocate Dr. Willi Loose, is the trade group for the carsharing industry in Germany and they also publish a useful annual report.  They have an abbreviated but useful summary of international research on their website translated here.  As with other country sites, you can search for the cities that offer casharing - and in Germany that can be daunting, since there are over 110 companies offering carsharing in Germany.

France — Somewhat suprisingly, there's no organization representing all the carsharing services in France.  The Autopartage France group of cooperative carsharing services has recently rebranded itself as the Citiz Network.  They link to a very interesting national survey of carsharing in France translated here.   An interesting, if a bit purist, discussion forum about autopartage is La Voiture Autrement, machine translated into English here.

Australia — has several major carshares serving multiple cities.  The Australian government has published several reports about carsharing over the years.

Japan — Not surprisingly, given the density and cost of owning a car carsharing has taken off in Japan with a major parking operator and car rental firm offering carsharing.  In addition, there are many smaller groups offering EVcarsharing services, as well as experimental programs from Toyota (Ha:Mo) and Nissan (Choimobi). Email me if you are interested in more information.

The rest of Asia — Without Google Search and GoogleTranslate, the scattered news articles about carsharing developments would be the inscrutable Orient!

And a final comment, do not overlook Wikipedia.  Even I am constantly discovering detailed stuff on Wikipedia I'd never seen before.

Happy hunting.  But don't say I didn't warn you!  That's what we consultants are in business for - to help you sort out the wheat from the chaff - much faster and more economically.