A closer look at car sharing mobility styles & socioeconomic factors

In the STARS project, task 4.2 and 4.3 entailed further analysis of current car sharing users and potential future users regarding their mobility styles and sociodemographic profiles.

Five different mobility styles were found based on their attitudes towards car sharing, their political views, personal norms, environmental awareness and their travel patterns:

  1. Multi-mode and ambivalent
  2. Car-focused green
  3. Active P-T transit green
  4. Car-focused ambivalent
  5. Car-flexible green.

The analyses in 4.3 focused on operational characteristics of the car sharing services and related these to the mobility styles obtained as well as how these are related to the contextual factors and individual factors.

It could be concluded that the free-floating with operational area services are more likely to grow in terms of number of subscribers in Italy, while roundtrip station-based services have the highest number of potential users in Sweden. Clearly, these previsions might be affected to a certain extent by the existence of such services in the cities where the non-users live.

The number of car sharing operators in the city was not a predictor of behaviour, which indicates that by only increasing the number of operators within cities or fleet sizes is not enough to induce behaviour change. It is necessary to increase the perceived usefulness of car sharing services for people’s travel necessities. Along with that, increasing trust in the service availability and quality is also a possible strategy to foster use of car sharing.

 


Post written by Erika Ramos & Cecilia Jakobsson Bergstad, from the Department of Psychology at the Univeristy of Gothenburg, and STARS partners. 

 

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