Car2go will be car2gone, but other car-sharing services here to stay … and growing
Credit to Author: Susan Lazaruk| Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2020 16:27:26 +0000
Car2go had an inauspicious launch in Vancouver on June 15, 2011, also known as the day of the Stanley Cup riot. One of its blue-and-white Smart cars was flipped on its side and pummelled with a skateboard, all caught on video.
More than eight years later, the hugely popular car-share company, with 1,200 cars and 200,000 members, is leaving Vancouver, as of Feb. 29, after having helped grow the city into one of North American’s most successful car-sharing cities.
Car2go, now called ShareNow and owned by Daimler AG and the BMW group, is pulling out across North America and scaling back in Europe, citing the “volatile state of the global mobility landscape.”
But Vancouver’s car-sharing landscape, which includes Evo, Modo and Zipcar, is safe and healthy, according to Alex Bigazzi, a UBC transportation engineering professor.
Those companies “won’t be leaving here anytime soon,” he said. “Vancouver is a very good market.”
BCAA’s Evo, which doesn’t release revenue figures, is adding 250 vehicles to its fleet “as a first step” to meet the demand it expects car2go’s exit to create, said BCAA’s car-share vice-president, Tai Silvey. And Modo CEO Patrick Nangle said its 700-vehicle fleet posts “low double digit (profit) growth year over year.”
Bigazzi said car-sharing and ride-hailing do well in cities with “multimodal” transportation systems, which includes “really good transit, and lots of opportunities for walking and cycling” and high-density neighbourhoods that dissuade driving and encourage non-car travel.
But despite the vibrant industry, research and statistics show that so-called on-demand shared mobility, such as car-sharing and ride-hailing, may not be as green as proponents had hoped.
U.S. studies shows car-sharing elsewhere eats into transit ridership, not private car ownership. And ICBC statistics show car ownership recently has gone up, not down, and has grown faster than has the population.
Some point out driving a car-share or hailing a ride is still driving a car, which could add to congestion, depending on the time of day, and greenhouse gas emissions, if gas-powered.
“Evo trips are driving trips. And the majority of those trips (previously) would not have been made by car,” said Bigazzi, who admitted to using Evo more often than he used to since moving to UBC from an area where it wasn’t as available. “This is a really hot topic in the transportation world right now and it’s fairly contentious.”
He stressed that in multimodal cities, shared mobility “will overall reduce the amount individuals will drive.”
But maybe not the number of cars.
Car-sharing proponents often cite a 2016 University of California, Berkeley study that surveyed 10,000 car2go members in five cities, including Vancouver, in 2014 and 2015. Two to five per cent of respondents said they’d sold a car and between seven and 10 per cent said they put off buying one. The authors determined from that each shared car2go translated into a reduction of 11 private cars, or 28,000 fewer cars in the five cities.
When it announced its expansion, BCAA estimated Evo’s fleet of 1,500 vehicles had replaced 13,500 privately owned vehicles in its five years of operation.
Metro Vancouver is expected to grow by a million people in the next 20 years and with two cars for every three people, that means an additional 600,000 cars, said Nangle.
“We need to get ahead of the game now,” he said, by reducing private car ownership.
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But the number of cars registered in B.C., even in multimodal Vancouver, outran population growth. Bruce Schaller, a U.S. transportation consultant, reported that phenomenon last year in the eight major U.S. cities where Uber and Lyft are most concentrated.
ICBC’s “vehicle insurance policies in force” figures show the number of registered vehicles rose 10 per cent in B.C. between 2013 and 2017, to 3.2 million from 2.9 million. The population of B.C. rose six per cent over those same years, to 4.9 million from 4.6 million, according to B.C. Statistics.
In Metro Vancouver, the number of registered vehicles rose 10 per cent between 2013 and 2017, while the population rose seven per cent between 2014 and 2019. In the city of Vancouver, there were nine per cent more cars, while in Surrey, there were 21 per cent.
The Berkeley study also found car2go’s success slightly pushed down transit ridership. “Ride-hailing (also) poaches a lot of trips from transit,” said Bigazzi.
A new University of Kentucky study showed that rail ridership falls 1.3 per cent and bus ridership by 1.7 per cent in the year after ride-hailing enters a city.
In Metro Vancouver, car-sharing hasn’t appeared to cut into transit, with TransLink recording a 11 per cent hike in annual journeys between 2014 and 2018.
It’s too early to tell if ride-hailing will hurt transit, TransLink’s Dan Mountain said in an email. TransLink “supports a ride-hailing structure that complements public transit,” he said.
Bigazzi said the growing number of cars is helped by B.C.’s thriving economy because “car ownership is strongly defined by income” and British Columbians can afford cars.
“The transportation industry has been trying to encourage less auto dependence, and it’s hard,” he said. “People like to be able to have the autonomy and freedom of driving their own cars. And they’re still hoping for the magic source of a free energy and there is no such thing.”
Tai Silvey is the VP car-sharing at BCAA.
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