Carsharing
Refers to the joint ownership of a car, not to sharing a ride such as in Carpooling
Definition
"Carsharing is a system in which a fleet of cars is jointly-owned by the users.
This is different from Car pooling in which cars are owned privately and simply drivers allows passengers to use the empty car sits on their car. The key difference between Carsharing and Carpooling: carpooling exploits the cars already owned by people, carsharing exploits cars bought precisely for and by the carsharing group." (http://wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/CarSharing)
Discussion
The weakness of current carsharing models
By Erica Barnett at http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007087.html :
"My only real complaint about carsharing is that it has one major, built-in, self-limiting inefficiency: because cars must be returned to the spot where you pick them up, you can't take one-way trips. That means that even if what I really want to do is drive from my house to the store and to a friend's party, from which I'll get a ride or return by bus, I'm forced to drive to the party and drive home. (This also automatically makes me the designated driver.)
What's the solution to this conundrum? Actually, it's intuitive: supply, supply, supply. The more cars there are, the easier they are to access and use. So it stands to reason that when the ratio of cars to drivers reaches a certain saturation point, it will become possible to take a car from one carsharing spot and return it to another. Perhaps this will mean moving, at least initially, toward a model in which individual spots around a city are centralized into a smaller number of carsharing stations of half a dozen or more cars each. (In Seattle, these are called "pods.") Drivers could take whatever car is available, with specific cars such as trucks or convertibles available on a more limited basis for a premium.
Neither of the two largest carsharing companies in the U.S., FlexCar and ZipCar, currently offer one-way trips. However, my prediction is that as the popularity of carsharing increases and the companies' fleets grow larger, one-way trips are inevitable. And it's likely that this will only make carsharing more appealing: since 2000, Berlin's GreenWheels has allowed one-way driving, resulting in a 23 percent increase in trips.
Cities could take proactive steps to make one-way come sooner. Most carsharing programs are public-private partnerships already. A simple carbon tax on vehicle emissions -- charged either per ton of emissions produced, or as a flat motor-vehicle tax when drivers renews their registration -- could feed into a grant program for carsharing expansion, which would in time fund the purchase of enough cars to make one-way driving viable. New cars and one-way possibilities would, in turn, increase the visibility and popularity of carsharing, helping to make it a viable alternative for those who currently consider it an impractical luxury."
Car-sharing with a Small Group
Sarah Kuck:
"Some solutions are designed for ready-made networks of people. In their report Collaborative Services: Social Innovation and Design for Sustainability, François Jégou and Ezio Manzini discuss how residents of multi-unit buildings could create a group car-share account to ensure that they have access to specific vehicles nearby or in their building's lot:
- Using existing car-sharing businesses to set up a group car-share account for a building — residents are not obligated to join but having such an account will ensure that there are several available vehicles in a building’s lot or very close to it. The company can adjust how many vehicles it makes available to the building based on demand, and when the cars are not being used by residents, they are available to other members, thereby helping to keep the whole endeavor profitable. “It’s like classic car-sharing, but with one or several parking spaces near your building. We benefit from professionally managed vehicles: reservations via mobile telephone, maintenance, registration and replacement of vehicles — all without having to organize it."
(http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009760.html)
Example: Zimride
Examples
More Information
Word Cities Carshare Inventory at http://ecoplan.org/carshare/general/cities.htm