EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

What will be the environmental effects of new free-floating car-sharing systems? The case of car2go in Ulm

Jörg Firnkorn and Martin Müller

Ecological Economics, 2011, vol. 70, issue 8, 1519-1528

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is the discussion of the environmental effects of a free-floating car-sharing system operating in Ulm, Germany. The system, called car2go, allows users to take and leave vehicles at any point within the city limits. Thus opposed to traditional car-sharing, there are no fixed stations and in particular one-way trips of any length are possible without a booking requirement. Since this is the first free-floating system in operation, there is as yet no associated empirical research. Based on primary data from a survey, a model was developed to forecast the environmental impact of car2go. The prognosis considers the period of five years after the launch of car2go in 2009 and indicates a CO2-reduction per average car2go-user. In addition, more than a quarter of the survey respondents stated that they may forgo a car purchase if car2go was offered permanently. By reaching a greater share of citizens than traditional systems, the results indicate that free-floating car-sharing systems could contribute to reducing private vehicle ownership in cities.

Keywords: Car-sharing; Environmental; effect; Free-floating; system; Public-private; transportation; Product-service; system (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (116)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800911001030
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:70:y:2011:i:8:p:1519-1528

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:70:y:2011:i:8:p:1519-1528