Matthew Mason-Phillips, program co-ordinator for the City of Ottawa EnviroCentre, represents VIRTUCAR’s newest corporate client.
Suzie Fraser was in a bind. She needed to move a group of volunteers around the city for Project Porchlight’s campaign of delivering an energy efficient bulb to every house in Ottawa, but didn’t have enough vehicles to do it.
Then she discovered car sharing.
“We were able to have a car only when we needed it,” Fraser says. The non-profit organization was able to gain fast access to a fleet of cars any hour of the day, supplying its volunteers with transportation without having to buy vehicles.
The carsharing business model was developed in Europe and brought to Canada in 1993 with the first company opening in Quebec City. Membership provides customers with cars, which are stationed around the city on a per-need basis. Customers rent the cars by the hour and leave the troubles of ownership to the carsharing company.
After growing slowly for the past 15 years, the carsharing business is starting to heat up according to Kevin McLaughlin of Autoshare.
“In Toronto it’s just going gangbusters,” he says. Autoshare is adding 200-300 customers a month and looking at adding large businesses to their list of customers, he says.
In Ottawa, 10 local businesses use carsharing through local company VRTUCAR. But according to VRTUCAR’s president Wilson Wood, most of the business customers are self-employed lawyers, accountants and health professionals.
He says his company is increasingly looking for business clients in the downtown area to expand the business.
One potential large client he’s looking at is the owner of new condominiums being built downtown. Currently, he says he is in negotiations to provide services for the condo’s 200-plus tenants.
“In places that are well served by transit, people are looking to an urban lifestyle,” says McLaughlin. He says he sees the carsharing business is being driven by young people who don’t want to be driving their cars downtown, but still need a car once in a while for work or personal errands.
Despite some limitations, carsharing businesses are expanding to attract new customers across North America.
At the end of September, Enterprise, one of the biggest car rental companies, announced it too was getting into the business by offering carsharing to businesses, universities and government.
“As businesses and universities look for ways to support employees or students who need vehicles for occasional use, car sharing is a great solution,” said Jeff Parell Enterprise’s senior vice-president at the announcement of the new program called ‘WeCar.’
“This news from Enterprise would signify that there is a large market,” says Susan Shaheen, an expert on carsharing.
As co-director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California at Berkeley, Shaheen has been studying the industry’s growth across North America. In Canada, she found close to 40,000 members using over a thousand vehicles across the country.
She says that in some instances corporations have sold their entire fleet of cars and joined carsharing programs.
Still, Fraser says her organization cannot use the service for campaigns in rural areas, as the cars are only stationed in the downtown area. She also says Project Porchlight’s staff would not use it for out-of-town trips.
Carsharing distinguishes itself from rental agencies by giving members the ability to take short multiple trips during the week without paying for time they don’t use.
Back in Ottawa, Wood says he is feeling optimistic about the future. He says his business now has 50 cars in 38 locations and is always considering expansion.
“People are very interested in having a green presentation. They are going after clients . . . and they’re saying ‘we practise what we preach.’ "