Carsharing and the Built Environment

Abstract

The use of carsharing vehicles over a period of 16 months in 2006-07 was compared to built environment and demographic factors in this GIS-based multivariate regression study of an urban U.S. carsharing operator. Carsharing is a relatively new transportation industry in which companies provide members with short-term vehicle access from distributed neighborhood locations. The number of registered carsharing members in North America has doubled every year or two to a current level of approximately 320,000. Researchers have long supposed that public transit access is a key factor driving demand for carsharing. The results of this study, however, find an ambiguous relationship between the activity at carsharing locations and public transit access. Light rail availability is found to have a significant and positive relationship to carsharing demand. Regional rail availability is found to be weakly and negatively associated with carsharing demand, although limitations in the available data make it impossible to ascribe the observed difference to user demand, random variation, or other factors specific to the industry.

Modeling car-sharing membership as a mobility tool: A multivariate Probit approach with latent variables

“…Also here, car-sharing was found to be favored by young and highly educated 590 customers living in small households in an area which is well-connected by public transportation [24,25]. However, in contrast to earlier findings, a higher household income per capita does not have a significant effect on car-sharing membership.…”

“…20 The literature suggests that station-based car-sharing reduces private vehicle ownership as well as vehicle kilometers travelled [9,10,11], although there has been less agreement on the magnitude of this impact [12]. Moreover, previous research has consistently revealed that car-sharing schemes blossom best in dense 25 urban areas with a good public transportation supply and mainly attract young, highly-educated, higher-income, urban, car-free and single-household residents [13,14,3].…”

Early adopters of carsharing with and without BEVs with respect to gender preferences

“…Carsharing subscribers are mainly male and between the age of 35 and 45 years, with a higher education and income [4,5,22]. Referring to merely free floating carsharing services, which presents a new mobility service, more than half of the users are male and younger than 35 with a high share of full-time employment [5,23]. Additionally, in general carsharing subscribers have a higher income [5,23], although Petersen found a lower income in his sample from the early nineties [24].…”

“…Carsharing subscribers are mainly male and between the age of 35 and 45 years, with a higher education and income [4,5,22]. Referring to merely free floating carsharing services, which presents a new mobility service, more than half of the users are male and younger than 35 with a high share of full-time employment [5,23].…”

“…Sociodemographic characteristics of early adopters of carsharing are congruent with the identified characterisations of early adopters of electrical vehicles. Carsharing subscribers are mainly between the age of 35 and 45 years, with a higher education and income [3][4][5]. International studies showed a higher environmental awareness of both groups of early This article is part of the Topical Collection on Driving Societal Changes towards an Electro-mobility Future Description: This Paper is part of a multimethodological study to answer the question on how women can be addressed as target groups for e-carsharing.…”