Transportation issues can create seemingly no-win conflicts for planners, whether it’s dealing with traffic demand management, wrangling over parking requirements, addressing quality of life issues that accompany traffic congestion, or trying to reduce vehicle emissions to forestall climate change. A new “product-as-service” approach to vehicle use, called carsharing, is springing up in major metropolitan markets, smaller districts, and university campuses all across the country. Where the conditions are right to support carsharing, these programs can give planners another flexible...
Carsharing is the shared use of a vehicle fleet by members for tripmaking on a per trip basis. There are four forms of carsharing in North America today: 1) roundtrip, 2) one-way, 3) peer-to-peer, and 4) fractional. In roundtrip carsharing, members begin and end a trip at the same vehicle location and typically pay for use by the hour, mile, or both. One-way carsharing enables members, who pay by the minute, to begin and end a trip at different locations—either throughout a free floating zone or stationbased model with designated parking locations. Peer-to-peer carsharing functions much...
Adam Stocker, Jessica Lazarus, Sophia Becker, Susan Shaheen
2016
Researchers at the Transportation Sustainability Research Center (TSRC), UC Berkeley in partnership with Zipcar conducted a survey to better understand the impact that carsharing has on college member travel behavior, vehicle holdings and driving, quality of life, and transportation expense savings. The survey design was conducted as a joint effort among TSRC, Zipcar, and university representatives. The college/university carsharing market is a unique environment for both carsharing users and operators. Due to the particular living arrangements and travel needs of college members,...
As of October 2014, carsharing was operating in 33 countries, five continents, and an estimated 1,531 cities with approximately 4.8 million members sharing over 104,000 vehicles. Europe, the largest carsharing region measured by membership, accounts for 46% of worldwide membership and 56% of global fleets deployed. The world’s second largest carsharing market, North America, accounts for 34% of worldwide members and 23% of vehicle fleets. In 2014, Mexico maintained the highest member-vehicle ratios (131:1), followed by 107:1 in Italy.
Susan Shaheen, PhD, Elliot Martin, PhD, and Apaar Bansal
2015
The California Zero-Emission Vehicle (ZEV) Mandate, adopted in 1990, was aimed at increasing the sale and dissemination of low- or zero-emission vehicles throughout the California auto market. ZEVs include plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHVs) and all-electric vehicles (EVs). In an attempt to accelerate the exposure of ZEVs in the general population, in 2001, additional credits were allotted to automakers in return for placing ZEVs into transportation networks, such as carsharing fleets. This policy is set to end in 2018. This white paper presents the results of a study that evaluated the impacts...
Since 1994, 83 carsharing programs have been deployed in the Americas — 45 are operational and 38 defunct. As of January 1, 2015, there were 20 active programs in Canada, 23 in the United States (U.S.), one program in Mexico, and one in Brazil — totaling approximately 1,529,811 carsharing members sharing 22,134 vehicles in the Americas. The three largest carsharing operators in the U.S. and Canada support 95.9% and 83.2% of the total membership, respectively. Only one operator provides service in both Mexico and Brazil.
Business carsharing (or corporate carsharing) is a form of carsharing that enables commercial businesses to reduce or eliminate private vehicle eets typically maintained for business purposes. It may provide exclusive-use vehicles to clients that are shared among employees and departments or it may offer shared vehicles where the client accesses the vehicles as part of a larger carsharing eet (i.e., employees use the same vehicles that are shared by individuals and/or other business members) (Shaheen and Cohen, 2012).
In October 2013, TSRC hosted the inaugural Shared-Use Mobility Summit in San Francisco, a two-day event facilitating a lively dialogue among mobility providers, policymakers, governmental agencies, non-profits, affiliated industries, technologists, academics, and other stakeholders on the current state of the practice, opportunities, and obstacles to market expansion in the fields of carsharing, public bikesharing, ridesharing, ondemand ride services, employer shuttles, and related sharing economy affiliates. Day One featured sessions on industry trends, success stories, the sharing...
Ingrid Ballús Armet, Susan Shaheen, PhD, Kelly Clonts, and David Weinzimmer
2014
Peer-to-peer carsharing is an innovative approach to vehicle sharing in which vehicle owners temporarily rent their personal automobiles to others in their surrounding area. Peer-to-peer carsharing belongs to the larger sharing economy, an economic model premised on the notion of collaborative consumption as opposed to ownership. This study examined public perception of peer-to-peer carsharing and potential market characteristics through an intercept survey conducted in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. Three hundred respondents from 14 locations in San Francisco (n=150) and...
This study aims to evaluate the potential of electric vehicle (EV) carsharing services to address social and environmental disparities in urban transportation through an evaluation of BlueLA, a one-way station-based carsharing service in Los Angeles, California. BlueLA provides a clean and affordable mobility option in underserved communities that face significant air quality burdens and have historically been excluded from environmental benefits. By incorporating BlueLA trip activity data from January 2021 to December 2022 (n = 59,112 trips) and an online...
