Towards a deprivatisation of car ownership

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World Transport Policy & Practice – Vol. 19, No. 4

This issue of WTPP returns to some earlier themes that are central to an improved understanding of how to get things right and reduce the likelihood of wrong-headedness.  Jeff Kenworthy opens 19/4 with a robust study of 42 cities and demonstrates that car use and GDP growth are decoupling.  Helmut Holzapfel looks at  German road and motorway planning and building and shows that it is totally removed from the reality of life as lived by citizens.  Editor John Whitelegg closes this latest edition of WTPP with a critical review of a compendium of articles, Transport Beyond Oil, while in his opening editorial reminding us of the work and contributions of our greatly missed colleague Paul Mees, a world-class transport researcher and policy analyst,who  died in Melbourne on 19^th June 2013, aged 52. Far too young and still so much to do.

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Editorial guidelines for contributors

Editorial policy and guidelines for contributors

We want to make sure that World Streets is a good read, and a fast one, for our overloaded colleagues who are struggling with these challenges in cities and countries around the world, as well for others trying to follow the full range of issues involved.

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Nordic Carsharing: The City of Oslo

This 2011 report by May Hald, Petter Christiansen and Vibeke Nenseth of the Norwegian Center for Transport Research on carsharing in Oslo gives us a good feel not only for carsharing activities in that one city but also more generally user preferences and choice factors in Norway and Scandinavia.

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The Three Faces of Carsharing: France 2005

Here by way of historical background to accompany our just getting-underway World Carshare 2013 update please find some working notes that I pulled together for the purpose of a presentation at the first official government meeting on carsharing in France (seven years after we set up our own unofficial working group with the OECD in 1998). What you have here was extracted from a much longer thinkpiece that I was  drafting on the subject at the time. Have a look and let us know if you find some vision in what follows. Or the lack thereof if that is your read of the evidence as et out here and available from other sources.

 - - > Full report available here.

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World Carshare Country Reports: 2009 to present

As part of this 2013/2014 update program on our country reports in this series, we have now grouped all of the past, including the latest, articles and reports which you can call up by clicking http://goo.gl/P0rlhl.  As of this date you will find 26 featured articles, thus far reporting on status and developments in Greece, Norway, Great Britain, United States, Canada, Netherlands, Croatia, France, Japan, China, Sweden, Italy, Iceland and Singapore. As you will see there is no standard reporting format in these cases, preferring to leave it  to each contributing author to work with the format with which they're most comfortable, and to whom we can now express once again our sincere thanks.

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Why are americans driving less? (Guess!)

Jarrett Walker, the transport planning consultant behind the Human Transit  blog has done all of us a favor by providing a short review on an excellent report freely available from the U.S. PIRG Education Fund Frontier Group under the title  A NEW WAY TO GO: The Transportation Apps and Vehicle-Sharing Tools that Are Giving More Americans the Freedom to Drive Less.. The PIRG report announces its colors, opening with the words . . .

Most Americans want to drive less. For some, it’s a matter of economics. Transportation is the second-largest household expenditure, after only housing, and ahead of food, clothing, education and health care. Owning, maintaining and fueling a car is a significant drain on household budgets, especially when times are tight. For others . . .

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Support World Carshare 2013/2014

Make it happen:

As you can well imagine, there is quite a bit of work that goes into a worldwide collaborative  program at this level of ambition. And to achieve the level of results that this important policy topic deserves we need help. This can take any of several forms and that is where you come in:

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"Carsharing 2000": Sustainable Transport’s Missing Link

Paris, 21 October 2013. How much we learned about car sharing, and more importantly sustainable transport in cities, over the last decade and a half? To put that question into perspective, please find below the full text of a year 2000 collaborative report prepared here in Paris with the help of knowledgeable colleagues from around the world which does a pretty good job of summing up the state-of-the-art state of thinking about these matters at the end of the 20th century. Have a look at this 13 year old overview of the industry and its prospects, and tell us what you think.

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The World Carshare Consortium (1997 - present)

This free, cooperative, independent, international communications program supports carsharing projects and programs, world wide. Since 1997 it offers a convenient place on the web to gather and share information and independent views on projects and approaches, past, present and planned future, freely and easily available to all comers.

- - > Check it out at http://worldcarshare.com/

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The xCar: New Ways of Owning and Using Cars in the 21st Century

This is a collaborative thinking exercise addressing essentially a single question. But one of many parts. What is the "modern motor car" going to look like in the decade immediately ahead?  Will it be  more of the same?  Or will it mutate into a very different form of mobility?  Who is going to own it?  And how is it going to be used? Where will it be driven (and eventually parked)?  Will it be piloted by a warm sapient human being, or will it be driverless? Will it still have wheels, doors and tires? What will be its impact on the environment?  And what will be the impact of the "environment" on it? On public safety? On quality of life for all.  Will it be efficient, economic and equitable? Who will make them and where?  Is it going to create or destroy jobs? And how fast is all of this going to occur?  . . .

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xCars: New ways of owning and using cars (on Facebook)

- - > Check it out at https://www.facebook.com/groups/worldcarshare/

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North American Carsharing Trends: 2013

This contribution by Susan Shaheen and Adam Cohen in which they pick out and analyze  some of the main trends and eventual future prospects of the carshare "industry" in North America is the second country report in this World Streets 2013/14 series updating our readers on the latest developments internationally in this fast-moving, fast-developing field of new ways of owning and using cars. To access all the reports in this series thus far, you are invited to click to  http://worldstreets.wordpress.com/category/carshare/

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World Carshare Collaborative Surveys: 2013/2014

Over the last five years World Streets has published close to 100 articles looking at carsharing status and prospects in around 20 different countries on all continents.  We are now undertaking to update this series, starting with an excellent contribution just in on how carsharing is developing (and developing fast) in the Netherlands which you can see today at http://worldstreets.org. Others will follow in hte coming weeks and months.

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Carsharing on the rise in the Netherlands (Act 3)

Thanks to the Dutch Kennisplatform Verkeer en Vervoer (KpVV) (which I roughly translate to the Knowledge Platform for Traffic and Transportation) for this excellent update (June 2013) on the situation for carsharing in the Netherlands. It is part of a series entitled "Trends and developments in the field of sustainable and smart mobility". The numbers are interesting and tell a story, and their analysis is first-class. Recommended reading and in the hope that we shall shortly be able to share with our readers similar country reports and updates of the state of car sharing in other countries, both in Europe and beyond.

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How the Dutch got their cycle paths (Act 2)

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How the Dutch failed to destroy their cities (Act 1)

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