Friday, July 24, 2009

Update: World Carshare month on World Streets

Three quarters of the way through World Carshare month, a quick resume of action and accomplishments thus far, along with a small shopping list for our active collaborators of work to be completed in the weeks ahead, hopefully.

Quite a reasonable flow of materials and comments have come in as a result of this first attempt on our part to see what happens if we provide a specific topic focus for one month of attention and collaborative inputs under World Streets. If you click here or under the corresponding item on the toolbar just to the left, you will be able to call up all of the articles and commentaries received under this topic heading to date.

Interesting reading if you wish to know more about this great way to get around, and as you certainly know there is always ample space for your comments and questions. This being one of the potential advantages of this kind of wide open collaborative knowledge-building operation.

We would draw your attention to the following map which records the location of visitors coming into the world carshare program site over the last 24 hours, and which gives a very good idea of the physical geography of carsharing. The overall pattern you can see here is pretty much consistent with what normally comes in through our World Carshare site. The continuing heavy concentration in Europe and North America, with the ANZ countries jogging just behind. The developing East Asian axis, the occasional ding from Saudi and the Emirates, but for the most part the Middle East, Africa and even Latin America dead as doornails. We present this latest map here as food for thought.



Next steps:

We are staying right at the heels of the 462 registered members of World Carshare, and intend to encourage and push as best we can in order to bring over to our World Streets readers more information, in the form of:


* Country profiles

* World Carshare supplier inventory update

* Commentaries on critical issues for Carsharing

Two points to close out this brief note:

First, as with bike sharing projects as well, it is our long held and continuously reinforced position as students of carsharing operations around the world that the key inhibiting factor to more and better services continues to be in the insufficient understanding of city administrations and local government concerning the benefits of these two great ways of reducing traffic and its associated environmental and other damages. There is very definitely a real international brief to do something about this.

Second, we can be absolutely sure that the carsharing postings and inputs here will continue well past the end of this month,; however once we have a more complete view of this month's accomplishments, we will be reporting on that as well.

Carsharing: A new mobility transport mode that every city and community on the planet should be looking at for near term implementation. Carsharing is ready to go. What about your city? What about you?

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