The Car2Go car-sharing service has taken as many as 28,000 vehicles off the road, with each shared vehicles eliminating the need for seven to eleven private cars, according two a team of California researchers who spent three years studying the service’s impact in three U.S. and two Canadian cities.
Investigators at UC Berkeley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center surveyed 9,500 Car2go users in Vancouver, Calgary, Seattle, San Diego, and Washington, DC. They found “that Car2go vehicles result in fewer privately-owned vehicles on the road, fewer vehicle miles travelled, and a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions,” research co-leader Susan Shaheen said in a release.
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In addition to removing cars from the roads, car-share vehicles tend to be smaller, newer, and more efficient that the average private car.
“Car2go has nearly two million members who share 14,000 vehicles in 30 cities,” the Monitor reports. “Users have access to the shared fleet of vehicles, which they can locate on an app and drop off at their destination anywhere within an urban zone, or sometimes at a designated parking station. Drivers typically pay per minute in the car, with discounted hourly and daily usage options available.”
On average, car-share participants “decreased their greenhouse gas emissions 10%, and eased the commutes of non-users by eliminating cars from the roads and parking spaces,” the Monitor notes.
Last month, the New York Times speculated that another ride-sharing service, Uber, could similarly “help lower the cost of living in urban areas, reduce the environmental toll exacted by privately-owned automobiles, and reallocate space now being wasted on parking lots to more valuable uses, like housing,” by relieving more households of the need to own cars.
