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Carsharing services have more than 1 million members in North America!

In case you missed it, Dr. Susan Shaheen and her staff at the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at U.C. Berkeley have issued their semi-annual update on the status of Worldwide carsharing.

· As of January 1, 2013, there were 46 active carshare programs in North America with 1,033,564 members sharing 15,603 vehicles. 

   · As of January 1,2013, 20 Canadian carshare operators claimed 141,351 members and shared 3,432 vehicles. In the United States, 891,953 members shared 12,131 vehicles among 25 operators. In Mexico, 620 members shared 40  vehicles among one operator. 

   · Between January 2012 and January 2013, carsharing membership grew 24.1% in the United States and 53.4% in Canada. Between January 2012 and January 2013, carsharing fleets grew 23.6% in the United  States and 35.9% in Canada. 

The TSRC report says that as of their last international survey in Oct. 2012 carsharing was operating in 27 countries with 1,788,000 members (est.) sharing over 43,550 vehicles.   At the same time there were 33 personal vehicle sharing operators worldwide, with 10 active or in pilot phase, three planned, and four defunct in North America. In addition, one-way/on-demand carsharing was operating in seven countries worldwide including Austria, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and USA.

As always, this information is extremely useful and much appreciated.  Thank you.

Carrot, Mexico City's no longer new start up carshare, is growing like gangbusters as you can see in this impressive infographic that Diego Solorzano and his team recently put together.

40 cars, 1,500 active members, steady growth and very satisfied users - what's not to like!

They told me they've also started a unique one-way option to one of their destinations - Santa Fe, a business destinations about 15 km from their main service area (in the lower left corner of the map below).  Customers can book any car for a one-way trip to this destination and only pay an extra hour for the option.


They have gotten around the issue of having to rewrite their reservation system (Metavera) in a unique way - a pre-login screen for reservations where the person can select one-way or hourly reservations.  Apparently, the one-way option is not yet very well-known (I only found out about via Twitter) but I'm sure that will change as members encounter this pre-login screen.  I'm sure it will be handy for members (going to the destination) and hopefully not a big headache for the Carrot fleet manager.

Congratulations and best wishes to the entire Carrot team.