Infographic: Why the World Needs to Start Car-sharing

December 22, 2011
Categories: Cars and Roads, Transport
Tags: ,
by Joe Peach
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This post is also available in: Chinese (Traditional)

78% of all car journeys are taken with a single person in the car, something which is a massively inefficient use of space, energy and money. Car-sharing schemes aim to address this, potentially reducing congestion, emissions, and costs of transportation by getting more people into one vehicle. If the complexity and potential risk of sharing your car puts you off, check out carpooling.com – a website which aims to tackle the hassle out of car-share. And if you need a little more persuasion, check out this fact-laden infographic on the topic.

Click the infographic below to view it in full size.

Images courtesy of Gwenal Piaser on flickr and carpooling.com

  • ZA_SF

    Thanks for this infographic, but it’s very telling that with similar disposable income and gas price problems and less information technology, Americans carpooled twice as much in 1970 than they do today. I blame the culture of fear.

    Also, when the GG Bridge ended its 100% discount of the carpool lane (now 40% discount), carpooling dropped dramatically, but transit ridership improved. This suggests that in the Bay Area at least, carpooling incentives were stealing transit riders, not pulling people out of their solo-driven cars.

    http://ridesharechoices.scripts.mit.edu/home/histstats/
    http://goldengate.org/news/transit/trends-gas_fy2011.php

    So ask yourself this – when’s the last time you picked up a casual carpooler? Or found other non-creepy ways to renew trust between complete strangers?

  • Tanya in Philly

    “Car pooling” is not “car sharing”! Car sharing is hourly use of a car whether that car is owned by a car-sharing company or by an individual (peer-to-peer). The potential is huge for car sharing to reduce traffic and the number of cars as people commute to cities by public transit where they can then access shared cars as needed for trips during the day. Carsharing.net shows all the cities throughout the world where car sharing is available.

    • James

      Tanya – in the UK what is labelled “car sharing” is what you call “car pooling”.
      What you call “car sharing” is more often than not called a “car club”

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