Get smart and join the club
David Crawford looks at a growing, money-saving trend towards cooperative car ownership
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Your support makes all the difference.Car clubs are on the move. Traditional pride in the status of personal car ownership is starting to yield to a more cooperative, 'pay-as-you-drive¿ approach, for highly practical cost reasons as well as in response to Kyoto-driven green agendas.
Car clubs are on the move. Traditional pride in the status of personal car ownership is starting to yield to a more cooperative, 'pay-as-you-drive¿ approach, for highly practical cost reasons as well as in response to Kyoto-driven green agendas.
The Government is actively encouraging the idea, by urging local authorities to include provision for car clubs in their 2006/7 to 2010/11 local transport plans (LTPs). Official Department for Transport (DfT) guidance recommends making organised car shares an integral part of planning policies - specifically when it comes to granting consents for new residential developments. Philip Igoe of Carplus, an umbrella charity supporting car club development, is looking forward to a healthy crop of proposals when councils submit their LTPs to the DfT in July this year.
One major incentive for motorists is the cost saving, with some club members claiming to save between £2,000 and £3,000 a year on maintenance, insurance and road tax.
To join one of the new breed of commercial operations, they typically pay a registration fee and/or membership charge, a returnable deposit to cover damage and a user rate of around £4 to £5 an hour. For this, they gain the right to drive a Vauxhall, Citroën or Volkswagen model, which is reserved for them at a nearby designated parking bay or "car station".
Equally effective as an incentive is the continuing pressure on urban parking space. "Green"-minded local authorities, such as the London Borough of Camden, are turning the screw by actively using the planning process to encourage residential developments that are car-free or car-capped (ie with fewer parking spaces than homes).
In response, property developers are warming to the idea of making provision for on-site car clubs, particularly in densely populated inner-city areas. The idea has economic as well as planning advantages, since the need to put in fewer parking spaces can free up expensive land for more homes.
One operator, WhizzGo, is currently working with Barratt Homes and the London borough of Southwark on a number of residential schemes across the capital. Another, Smart Moves, is partnering developers including Taylor Woodrow and St James Homes. Streetcar is another operator in London.
Another key factor is the recent availability of modern electronic technologies (known as intelligent transport systems, or ITS). Operators can use these to create "smart" packages combining internet booking, smartcard-based member identification for security, and two-way wireless communications between vehicles and management offices for automatic reservation and logging of charging information for invoicing.
The idea of the car club began as a community venture in Switzerland after the Second World War, and had spread to Germany and the Netherlands by the Eighties. In the Nineties, it crossed the Atlantic to the US and Canada, where there are currently more than 60,000 individual members and forecasts of tenfold growth over the next five years.
The old community-type concept survives in schemes such as the Rusty Car Pool in Leicester, which has been going since a group of neighbours first banded together in 1976. It continues to run on a purely voluntary basis with six vehicles, between eight and 12 years old.
These are kept at members' houses and serve 21 adults (with 16 children between them) as well as two local businesses. Members book by phone and pay a subscription and mileage charges based on logbook entries to keep it self-financing.
Smart Moves is the largest of the new-style commercial operators. Established in 1998, it now has clubs in Brighton and Hove, Bristol, Edinburgh and London.
It was joined in the field in 2004 by WhizzGo, which started in Leeds and, this month, opened up in London. Streetcar, which also started operating last year, now has around 25 locations in the capital. All these operators use basically the same technology. Members use the internet (or phone) to pre-book their car at a convenient "station", where it is then automatically reserved for them.
When collecting it, they pass a personal smartcard over a reader located behind the windscreen to unlock the door. Once inside, they enter a PIN into the onboard computer, the display on which keeps them informed of distances driven and return times. Charges can by the hour, or a combination of time and distance.
The UK's longest-established commercially run car club is in Edinburgh, where some 500 members share 24 Vauxhall Corsas and Astras based in 16 designated on-street locations. Operator Smart Moves plans to expand to at least 40 cars by the end of this year with the support of the city council and financial contributions from developers.
One longstanding member is Dr Alister Hamilton, a lecturer in electronics at Edinburgh University, who has never owned a car. The Hamiltons use the service for supermarket and DIY shopping, taking their three children to parties and sporting events, and weekend trips out of town.
Dr Hamilton reckons that membership saves him £150 a month when compared with outright car ownership. He thinks the service works "extremely well", provided that he remembers to forward-plan his bookings at popular times, and accepts that he may not always get his favourite car.
Eight of the fleet are also available for city council staff between 8am and 6pm Monday to Friday, after which they revert to general club member use.
Transport cabinet member Cllr Andrew Burns says: "It makes economic sense. It costs less than leasing pool cars and the car club looks after the maintenance." Another firm that uses the service is a group of consulting civil and structural engineers, David Narro Associates.
Research suggests that each shared car replaces six privately owned ones, and that people drive less when they share. The result can be substantial reductions in both demand for parking and pollution from exhaust emissions.
Philip Igoe estimates that around 1,000 new members joined car clubs in UK in 2004. Over the next five years, he expects to see operations up and running in around 150 towns and cities, many of them as the result of initiatives by local authorities.
David Crawford is a contributing editor of ITS International
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