The effects of and the possibilities for offering car sharing services

This master thesis presents a spatial market analysis about the explanatory factors for the demand to traditional car sharing services in residential areas. The principle of car sharing is as follows: a provider of car sharing services allocates a vehicle to a neighborhood or city. The municipality often reserves parking space for the shared car and people who register themselves at the car sharing services company are able to use the car at any time they would like. Customers of a car sharing company only pay for using the car. Costs with respect to purchase, maintenance and depreciation are for the provider. According the theory, offering car sharing services probably has some advantages with respect to sustainable mobility, such as a complementary relation with the use of public transport and bikes, a reduction in the demand for parking space and car mileages for former car owners, a travel solution for people which do not possess a car and increasing awareness about mobility behavior. Some disadvantages are also present, such as an increasing car use of people which did not drive before and also the current benefits with respect to the solution of traffic and environmental problems are very low, because there are very few customers. However, car sharing is a relatively new concept and is continuously growing in the Netherlands and that’s why it may have social benefits with respect to sustainable mobility in the long term and may be an integral part of a total sustainable mobility package of public transport (long distances), cycling (short distances) and car sharing (tangential and regional distances). According the theory, there exist many interactions between transport and land use and that’s why some hypotheses have been conducted in order to test some relationships between spatial indicators and the use of car sharing services. Especially, the use of cycling and public transport and density seems to have a positive impact on the availability of car sharing services On the other hand, also some characteristics with respect to customers probably have a large explanatory power, according the theory. The presence of higher-educated people, the presence of people between the ages of 25 and 45 years and the disposable income seem to have a positive impact on the availability of car sharing services, while car ownership and average household size have a negative relationship with the use of car sharing services, according the theory. In order to test the hypotheses, the impact of a lot of indicators have been empirically tested by using data from 100 municipalities which is almost a quart of the total number of municipalities in the Netherlands. The explanatory indicators have been tested in different compositions and the outcomes have extensively been analyzed.