We have been talking about the virtual and sharing economies and Vancouver hit a milestone today. In the parlance of Malcolm Gladwell, Vancouverites are “early adapters” to new technologies and ways of doing things. The rampant success of car sharing is a key example. Vancouver is the first city in the world to exceed 100,000 Car2Go members. Given that Vancouver’s population is 603,502 according to the 2011 Census, that means that 1 in 6 are members of this car sharing service.
And there are some fun statistics-the average trip is six kilometers and Vancouverites have driven 33.6 million kilometers since the inception of this company in 2011.
Car2Go has 1,250 Smart cars with another 1,000 vehicles offered by the other three car share companies, Evo, Modo and Zipcar.
I like the convenience of the service, and have many friends that have tried car sharing and liked it so much they sold their car. There are however challenges-for folks living outside of Vancouver and parts of North Vancouver these cars are not readily available. To make a business out of car sharing, there needs to be higher density and a frequency of users to make a profit. That required density is something that the other Metro Vancouver municipalities do not have-yet.
The Vancouver Sun article by Matthew Robinson on car share delves into the car share business, and also gives a thumbs up to the forthcoming Vancouver bike-share service.
Density is not a _primary_ factor; whether people need a car for commuting _is_ (in other words, do people live somewhat near where they work and/or study?)
However, there is a business model that could serve the low-density suburbs, which I have never seen implemented. It uses the cars for ridesharing when people live far from their place of work/study, but designating _two_ stations for each car. I describe it on my site: https://hearthhealth.wordpress.com/about/previously-published-works/feet-first-and-car-sharing-recent/combining-ridesharing-carsharing-a-new-hybrid-2007/
Chris Bradshaw, founder and (until 2006) co-manager of Vrtucar, Ottawa’s carsharing company (owned since late-2015 by Communauto of Montreal).
Sandy, I think it is somewhat erroneous to base your calculation on the Vancouver city population of 600,000. However, the Metro population of 2.4 million is probably not the right one to use either. I would think that some figure that includes the inner, transit oriented suburbs would be more appropriate for this calculation, something including Burnaby, New West, Richmond, Surrey, the North Shore – probably adds up to around 1.5 million people.