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...
Transforming urban mobility requires integrating public with private services into a single transportation system. Local governments and private companies face the challenge of how to coordinate themselves. An emblematic example is one-way carsharing (shared use of a fleet of vehicles that are typically free-floating throughout an urban area). Surprisingly, good practices for public and private players driving this change remain relatively undocumented. This paper proposes a systematic and balanced public-private approach to foster transportation innovation management. We review both...
Susan Shaheen, PhD, Elliot Martin, PhD, and Apaar Bansal
2018
This project is a two-year evaluation of pricing/incentives applied to the one-way, all electric carsharing system operated by car2go in San Diego, CA. This system is the only electric vehicle-based, one-way carsharing system with instant access (i.e., accessible without reservation) operating in the U.S. The goal of this project is to work with car2go and the San Diego region to develop and evaluate pricing/incentive structures for their members, which improve system operational efficiency (vehicle redistribution, state-of-charge management, use of vehicles placed at public transit...
Susan Shaheen, PhD, Elliot Martin, PhD, and Apaar Bansal
2018
Shared mobility services have now become firmly integrated into urban transportation systems across the globe. Carsharing, bikesharing, ridesourcing or transportation network companies (TNCs), and other systems now offer urban travelers access to transportation services that had long been previously only possible through personal vehicle ownership. Carsharing is arguably the pioneer mode of the sharing economy, given it ushered in a new way of thinking and access to the private automobile in the 20th century. Since its North American inception in Montreal in...
Car-sharing platforms, which have suffered during the Covid-19 lockdown, see an opportunity emerging: an increase in short-distance, local trips as U.S. consumers look for a different way of getting to work and running errands.
Executives from Turo, GetAround and ZipCar are hoping their pitch to customers—a means of travel that is cheaper than car ownership and sanitary—...
ShareNow — previously known as car2go — officially shut down its carsharing business in D.C. and North America over the weekend after eight years in the city. Despite its departure, experts say that carsharing isn’t struggling here in the D.C. region.
“Washington D.C. is actually one of the strongest marketplaces for these types of on-demand options in the entire United States,” said Susan Shaheen, a...
The US is about to lose another car-share service. On Wednesday, the Daimler- and BMW-owned entity that operates the service Share Now said the company's cars would disappear from North American streets by the end of February 2020. For customers in New York, Montreal, Seattle, Washington, DC, and Vancouver, that’s a bummer. It’s a bummer as well for those who enjoyed short-term rentals in London, Brussels, and...
When it comes to marketing, Turo tries to make every dollar count.
The company — sometimes referred to as the “Airbnb of car rentals” — was founded in 2009 with operations in San Francisco and Boston, and has since expanded to more than 5,000 cities across the U.S., Canada, Germany, and the U.K. It competes not only against established car rental giants such as National, Enterprise, Dollar, Avis and Hertz,...
With carsharing, individuals gain the benefits of private-vehicle use without the costs and responsibilities of ownership. One-way (or point-to-point) carsharing is a form of carsharing that enables members to pick up a vehicle at one location and drop it off at another. Typically, the carsharing operator provides gasoline, parking, and maintenance. Generally, participants pay a fee each time they...
Car-sharing service Car2Go was out of service in the Chicago area on Friday after dozens of its vehicles were stolen through the app this week.
Up to 100 cars were reported missing on Wednesday, the Chicago police department confirmed. Most cars have since been recovered, but a representative for Car2Go said Chicago vehicles have been put out of service until further notice.
