Car clubs in smaller, remote settlements may have more potential for Intensive Use. Rural car clubs may benefit from different operational strategies than urban ones.
Abstract
Car sharing can reduce car ownership and use, but services remain sparse in rural areas where car dependency is most entrenched, and decarbonisation potential is greatest. While some studies propose rural business models based on organisational and tourism uses, there is limited quantitative evidence to support operators and policymakers seeking to increase utilisation or expand services outside cities.
This study fills that gap by analysing car club booking data aggregated by station locations across England and Wales and then clustered according to their utilisation patterns.
The largest cluster comprises mainly established, urban services with shorter bookings throughout the week (“standard use”). The second cluster comprises rural and suburban services with relatively few users and lower mileage (“low use”) and the third is a smaller set of rural services with substantially higher mileage, longer bookings and utilisation levels that can exceed those of urban clubs (“intensive use”).
The intensive use cluster demonstrates the potential of rural car clubs. Cluster membership is shaped less by the socioeconomic or geographic characteristics and more by operational factors, including fleet size, time in operation to build a customer base, and whether vehicles were seeded by organisations rather than offered on a pay-as-you-go basis.0
Read through a sustainable transitions lens, the clusters represent different stages of niche embedding, with the viability of rural car clubs resting on different operational and policy strategies than urban services, with implications for their potential to contribute to low-carbon transport transitions beyond cities.