Car Sharing Offers A Means To Resolving Our Urban Congestion, AA Highlights
A wider rollout of car sharing platforms across Ireland could play a major role in easing urban congestion and reducing individual reliance on private cars, AA Ireland has highlighted.
As part of a recent AA Car Insurance survey of over 5,000 people, 1 in 5 of those who regularly drive in urban areas stated a wider rollout of car sharing services would have a direct impact on their commuting behaviour. When asked if they would avail of car sharing services were they more readily available, 6.72% of those surveyed they would be ‘very likely’ to do so, with a further 14.06% saying they were ‘somewhat likely’ to make use of a car sharing service.
“Quite often the discussion on urban transport can be focused solely on Dublin, but in all of our major cities we have created an atmosphere of car reliance as a result of under-investment in public transport alternatives and high-quality cycling infrastructure. It might seem strange to suggest a car-share model to reduce our reliance on the private car, but this has been shown to work in other cities across the world,” Conor Faughnan, AA Director of Consumer Affairs stated. “City-centre based car-share platforms can help to reduce the number of single-occupancy cars coming into a city as people feel more comfortable using public transport or cycling to get to work as they know they can avail of a car should they need to during the course of their working day.”
“Ultimately there is no single fix to our urban transport issues and we need to simultaneously start improving public transport, cycling infrastructure and investing in viable car share systems if we are to meet current and future demands. By increasing the availability of electric cars through a car sharing model, we can also start to make some immediate progress in improving the air quality in our city centres.”
The AA’s survey also found that increasing the availability of car-share systems in cities across Ireland would also encourage many motorists to switch their daily commute to alternative methods.
36.31% of those survey by the AA stated that were car sharing more readily available, they would be very likely to use public transport for their main daily commute, with 24.39% saying they would be somewhat likely to make a change to public transport. Meanwhile, almost 10% of respondents said that they would be very likely to start commuting primarily by bike in such a scenario.
“If you look at other cities which have rolled out car-sharing models, time and time again it has been shown to encourage people to travel by alternative modes than jumping into the car every morning. Particularly, in Bremen, which has a population similar in size to Dublin, there was a noticeable reduction in the percentage of households opting to purchase or retain a second car once they began making use of the city’s car-share service,” Faughnan added. “A similar approach here could offer a quick win in terms of easing our reliance on the private car, where new approaches such as BusConnects will take a significantly longer time to roll out.”
