Below you will find our map reporting on the last eighty people dropping into the website this 
morning of the World Carshare Consortium which groups more than 450 people, organizations, companies, and agencies who together are defining the field. A pretty typical day in the carshare world.
Notice anything?
I don't know but since it is World Carshare month here on Streets, you may have some thoughts on this. We invite you to make them here. Click to Comment just below and fire away.
PS. Our Streets theme for next month, August, is "Getting around in Africa: Day to day lives".
Monday, July 13, 2009
World Carshare: Lateral thinking anyone?
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Well, in North America, which is dominated by the car, you're getting people thinking about downsizing maybe, thinking about maintaining access to the car, without owning one.
ReplyDeleteI don't know Europe well enough. You have plenty of car owners, maybe it's a similar thought.
In Asia, maybe as far as car usage goes they could take a lesson from the thinking of Alexander Gerschenkron. His seminal paper "Economic Advantages of Backwardness," made the point that newly industrializing nations had the advantage of being able to adopt the latest technology, because they weren't concerned about maintaining the value of decades of previous investment.
"Car-dom" doesn't work for cities. But cities don't have the means to do the same kinds of great advertising campaigns that car companies do.
In a Gerschenkronian fashion, maybe cities in Asia could push carsharing alternatives as opposed to strong encouragement of car ownership (although recognize in China that many of the state governments have significant investment in the automobile industry, and see automobile manufacturing as an important component of state and national industrial policy).
It would require figuring out "tranches" of typical types of trips and being able to shift the paradigm to a carsharing scenario.
Thinking in China today (i.e. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/24/business/worldbusiness/24firstcar.html?pagewanted=print from the NYT ) isn't like that in Japan, albeit which is in a far different stage of development of its industrial and consumer economy (i.e., http://www.thegreencarwebsite.co.uk/blog/index.php/2009/06/17/are-car-buying-attitudes-changing/ ).
Richard Layman, Washington DC, USA
Well, in North America, which is dominated by the car, you're getting people thinking about downsizing maybe, thinking about maintaining access to the car, without owning one.
ReplyDeleteI don't know Europe well enough. You have plenty of car owners, maybe it's a similar thought.
In Asia, maybe as far as car usage goes they could take a lesson from the thinking of Alexander Gerschenkron. His seminal paper "Economic Advantages of Backwardness," made the point that newly industrializing nations had the advantage of being able to adopt the latest technology, because they weren't concerned about maintaining the value of decades of previous investment.
"Car-dom" doesn't work for cities. But cities don't have the means to do the same kinds of great advertising campaigns that car companies do.
In a Gerschenkronian fashion, maybe cities in Asia could push carsharing alternatives as opposed to strong encouragement of car ownership (although recognize in China that many of the state governments have significant investment in the automobile industry, and see automobile manufacturing as an important component of state and national industrial policy).
It would require figuring out "tranches" of typical types of trips and being able to shift the paradigm to a carsharing scenario.
Thinking in China today (i.e. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/24/business/worldbusiness/24firstcar.html?pagewanted=print from the NYT ) isn't like that in Japan, albeit which is in a far different stage of development of its industrial and consumer economy (i.e., http://www.thegreencarwebsite.co.uk/blog/index.php/2009/06/17/are-car-buying-attitudes-changing/ ).
Richard Layman, Washington DC, USA