Carsharing and sustainable travel behavior: Results from the San Francisco Bay Area

Abstract

Over the past decade, carsharing has grown considerably in the United States, particularly in major metropolitan areas. This innovative business model offers individuals the opportunity to rent cars by the hour, providing them with greater flexibility for their mobility. Previous work on carsharing suggests that its adoption leads to a decline in household vehicle ownership, vehicle miles traveled, and associated greenhouse gas emissions. Utilizing representative data from the 2010–2012 California Household Travel Survey, this paper presents an analysis of travel behavior and vehicle ownership among carshare members versus non-members in the San Francisco Bay Area, focusing on a subsample of the population with access to carsharing at the U.S. census tract level. Consistent with previous findings on vehicle reduction, these results show that carsharing members own significantly fewer vehicles than non-members. However, lower levels of vehicle ownership are only found among households living in urban areas. In dense, urban neighborhoods, households with carsharing membership own 0.58 vehicles per household as compared with 0.96 vehicles of a control group. Suburban carshare members drive less than their non-carshare member counterparts – although the extent to which this difference can be attributed to self-selection it is unknown. This study also finds that among carsharing households that do own vehicles, a greater share of those vehicles are alternative vehicles (e.g., hybrid, plug-in hybrid electric, and battery electric). Among vehicles owned by the subsample examined in this study, electric drive vehicles represent 18.3% of those owned by carshare member households, as compared with 10.2% of the vehicles owned by non-carsharing households. This analysis finds that not only are urban carshare members likely to own fewer vehicles than the rest of the population, if they do own vehicles, they are more likely to own a vehicle with a smaller environmental footprint.