NO.79 ; Sharing is caring. Car sharing means fewer cars

Sharing is caring. Car sharing means fewer cars

Researchers from UC – Berkeley recently released a study that found “car2go is on net reducing vehicles that would be owned by households, reducing driving, and thus lowering GHG emissions.” They reached this conclusion by asking over 9,000 car2go members how car2go impacted their driving habits and vehicle purchases. Based on the results across the five cities that were surveyed (San Diego, Seattle, Washington D.C., Calgary, Vancouver), the researchers estimated each car2go vehicle removed an average of 7 to 11 vehicles from the road.

Considering that there are over 500,000 car2go users, this study estimated that car2go alleviated the need for over 28,000 vehicles across the 5 cities surveyed in 2015. Removing vehicles means removing a serious amount of driving. The average age of the passenger vehicles on the road in the U.S. has climbed from8.4 years in 1995 to 11.4 years in 2014, and my first car lasted for over 15 years. Considering that people drive an average drive an average of 13,476 miles each year (which could be spread out over multiple vehicles), each new car sold today will likely be in service for well over 100,000 miles and perhaps more than 200,000.

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