TSRC Researchers Win TRB Award for Carsharing Paper

January 12, 2011

Three TSRC researchers have won TRB’s second annual Outstanding Research Paper in Public Transportation award for their paper illuminating car ownership changes of people belonging to carsharing organizations.

shaheen, martin, lidecker

A trio of TSRC researchers has won the Transportation Research Board’s second annual Outstanding Research Paper in Public Transportation award for their paper illuminating car ownership changes of people belonging to carsharing organizations.

Post-doctoral research engineer Elliot Martin (center), TSRC co-director Susan Shaheen, and graduate student researcher Jeffrey Lidicker, will be honored by the TRB at its annual meeting in January 2011 in Washington, D.C.

The paper, “The Impact of Carsharing on Household Vehicle Holdings: Results from a North American Shared-Use Vehicle Survey,” is based on a survey of more than 6,000 members of 11 of the largest car-sharing organizations in the U.S. and Canada. The survey provides the most complete and accurate look to date of how those who joined a carsharing operation change their travel patterns.

“The study is the largest of its kind to show that carsharing reduces vehicle holdings among households,” explained lead researcher Martin.  “But beyond its scale, an important contribution of this study was its ability to characterize the distribution of the age and fuel economy of vehicles shed by households with carsharing members.”

 Among their findings:

  • Carsharing members reduced their average vehicles per household from 0.47 to 0.24, a statistically significant shift, and most of this shift in ownership came from one-car households giving up their only car.
  • The fuel economy of carsharing vehicles used most often by those surveyed is on average 10 miles per gallon more efficient than the average vehicle discarded.
  • Carsharing has taken between 90,000 to 130,000 vehicles off North American roads.  With roughly 10,000 carsharing vehicles deployed by organizations across the continent, this translates to about 9 to 13 vehicles removed for every carsharing vehicle.