‘Everyone understands the environmental argument – now we must improve the consumer experience’

Introduced in Zurich in 1948, car sharing was hailed as a solution to ever-increasing traffic and pollution. But over 60-years later has the potential of car sharing fizzled out? Steve Moxey tells Matt Baker why new approaches are needed to widen participation.

It’s one of the most obvious ways of cutting emissions without sacrificing the convenience of traveling by car. But despite Britain currently seeing the biggest increase in cycling participation in 20-years, car sharing has yet to catch fire.

All across the country there are stories of car sharing schemes struggling to make an impact. In Buckinghamshire last year a school car share scheme ground to a halt because of criminal record checks. In Bristol there is a campaign to abolish a car sharing lane, which the AA says is great in theory but in practice “they waste road capacity and are a nightmare to enforce”. While membership of car sharing clubs outside of London continues to remain stubbornly small.

“Imagine if a major employer were to say to staff, ‘if you don’t look at ride sharing schemes we won’t refund your business travel?’ That would be a radical incentive.”

Steve Moxey, a research fellow at Manchester Business School, readily acknowledges that successful ride-sharing schemes are “few and far between at the moment”. He says the secret to getting more people to use the schemes is by ensuring they’re more consumer focused and using modern technology to make them more convenient to use.

“The issue is trust,” he says. “The problem with the current model is that people don’t know if the person you’ll be car sharing with is the right sort of person. It’s not a very sophisticated model. After all, would you really want to jump into a car late at night with Raoul Moat?”

One way to address this, he says, is by using matching technology. “Systems may not know all that much about the personal characteristics of members at the moment but these can be fine-tuned to achieve greater compatibility. An alternative approach is that if people don’t want to put their faith in systems they might want to put their faith in groups. So you could have a car-sharing pool where everybody is employed by Manchester Business School. Or the BBC or the Council. Instead of relying on a system to deliver compatibility you would be relying on community.”

In California a law has just been passed empowering private owners to lend out their cars for hire. This will now make every car in the state sharable.

Working as part of the University of Manchester’s Sustainable Consumption Institute team, Dr Moxey is currently looking to test some of these ideas as part of a trial with three Tesco stores in North London to encourage car sharing. Supported by Carbon Voyage, he says the scheme will attempt to tackle “behavioural resistance” by offering a blend of environmental benefits, consumer compatibility and convenience, eco friendly prizes and Tesco clubcard point rewards.

“Undoubtedly there will be difficulties in persuading some shoppers to surrender their privacy and control offered by the car in return for the benefits that come from ride-sharing,” he concedes. “So we’ll be assessing the effects of attitudes to the environment on ride-sharing and the extent to which customers will change their behaviour to help the environment.”

The extent to which customers will change their behaviour on the kind of scale that’s needed to meet the UK’s 80 percent carbon emission reduction target by 2050 may well require greater incentives, however. A more radical approach, Dr Moxey suggests would be to encourage large companies to introduce bold car sharing policies for staff.

“Imagine if a major employer were to say to staff, ‘if you don’t look at ride sharing schemes we won’t refund your business travel?’ That would be a radical incentive,” he says.

The irony isn’t lost him that other road transport business models that seek to get vehicles to share space – particularly in the freight industry – are experiencing rapid growth.  “The economic logic is that we’re trying to move dead space from vehicles,” he says. “It’s easier to convince haulage operators of the need to do this than motorists and that’s why we need to get the consumer experience right.”

Every day in the UK there are over 10 million empty seats on the roads and Moxey is convinced that a technological breakthrough could herald a rapid sea change in the public’s view of ride sharing schemes.

He’s currently working with IBM on developing a mobile phone application that would quickly match people with motorists that could take them on the journey they want.

“Imagine the scene,” he says. “It’s 8 o’clock at night on Oxford Road in Manchester and three people are standing in the rain wanting to get home to see the football. If they could quickly access a car sharing scheme to achieve this don’t you think they’d jump at the chance?”

This scene is already playing out across the world and it’s only a matter of time before it hits places like Manchester. The American company Goloco.org are one of the leading innovators in the field using a system of alerts to tell members when their friends or interest groups are going places they want to go to. Other companies are planning to introduce an all-electric fleet to their car-sharing pool, which encourages people to ride-share by being able to drive an electric car without having to buy one. And in California a law has just been passed empowering private owners to lend out their cars for hire. This will now make every car in the state sharable.

“There is huge potential for car sharing schemes to be delivered on a huge scale,” argues Moxey. “There are some great new ideas out there and we’ve only been scratching the surface so far.”

Image provided courtesy of: http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/3751322980/