Practice and public–private partnerships in sustainable transport governance: The case of car sharing in Sydney, Australia

Highlights

• Car sharing is a growing transport mode.

• An analysis of transport policy can produce a richer understanding of why car sharing works.

• Such analysis will benefit from a focus on practices and dualisms of public and private.

Abstract

Over the past two decades car sharing has become a mainstream transportation mode for over a million users worldwide with organisations now operating in more than 1100 cities across 26 countries and on five continents. Car sharing has developed alongside significant intellectual currents exploring the attributes and effectiveness of the diverse strands of transport policy. These debates include the efficacy of behaviour change programmes to shift transport practice, the imprints of neoliberalism on transport policy, and the withdrawal of the state as active agent in shaping policy privatisation. Despite its emergence amid these debates, car sharing has largely escaped their due consideration. This paper brings car sharing and transport policy scholarship into explicit conversation. It suggests that thinking car sharing through the broader lens of transport policy can produce a richer understanding of why car sharing works, and demonstrates that the case of car sharing sheds unique light onto key contemporary debates in transport policy. We present empirical data from an in depth content analysis of car sharing policy in Sydney, Australia. This data is used to explore the ways transport policy can, and does, facilitate successful car sharing. We draw upon two key theoretical frameworks to explain this success–practice theory and public–private partnerships. We conclude with a discussion of the way this unique analysis contributes to ongoing debates about the broader contours of transport governance.

Introduction

Over the past two decades, car sharing has become a mainstream transportation mode for over a million users worldwide with organisations now operating in more than 1 100 cities across 26 countries and on five continents: Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America (Shaheen and Cohen, 2012). Car sharing is arguably one of the more successful sustainable transport innovations of the past decade, with evidence suggesting that car sharing reduces rates of car ownership, frequency of car use and vehicle kilometres travelled (as reviewed by Kent (2013)).

Car sharing is a broad concept that covers several business and operational models (Shaheen and Cohen, 2012). Car sharing can be ‘peer-to-peer’, one-way, or affiliated with a specific public transport network. Car sharing organisations can be for-profit companies, community cooperatives, or non-profit organisations (Hampshire and Gaites, 2011). This paper adopts a conceptualisation of car sharing as a for-profit service that provides members with access to a fleet of vehicles. After becoming a member of a car sharing organisation, the user can book a car online or over the phone, typically on an hourly basis. The car is then accessed using an electronic key card or key fob, and members are billed at the end of the month for time and/or kilometres travelled. Cars are located in central business areas, neighbourhoods and major employment centres. In between bookings, idle car share cars usually occupy dedicated parking bays (sometimes referred to as ‘pods’—‘points of departure’) positioned on or off street. Each car share car has its own pod, and the car must be returned to that specific pod once the booking is complete. Car sharing organisations in the model described here are privately owned and they target their services at households and businesses. This is a relatively simple, yet extremely popular kind of car sharing (Shaheen and Cohen, 2012), and examples include Zipcar in the United States and the United Kingdom (http://www.zipcar.com/) and GoGet in Australia (http://www.goget.com.au/).

Car sharing has emerged amid intellectual currents exploring the attributes and effectiveness of the diverse strands of transport policy. This includes, inter alia, prolific concern with attempts to shift travel toward more sustainable modes through behaviour change and the imprints of neoliberalism on transport policy (whether that be through the role of corporations influencing and formulating transport policy, the continued prioritisation of economic growth as a societal goal, or the withdrawal of the state as active agent in shaping policy privatisation and devolution (Aldred, 2012; Goulden et al., 2014; Marsden et al., 2014)). Car sharing has largely escaped consideration in these transport policy debates. Intellectual attention to sustainable transport policy has instead largely focused on other alternatives such as cycling, walking and public transport use. In contrast, an abundance of scholarship is emerging that identifies the key dimensions, influences and implications of the growth of car sharing (see summary in Shaheen and Cohen (2012)). While this literature includes some analysis of the policy mechanisms that encourage and support car sharing (Shaheen et al., 2010), it has tended to devote more attention to reasons for individual adoption of car sharing, and its business and technological underpinnings. Scholarship on car sharing has proceeded, in other words, parallel to, rather than through an engagement with, debates on sustainable transport policy. This lack of discussion across these two intellectual currents impoverishes both. As we contend in this paper, bringing the key intellectual concerns of transport polity to bear on car sharing can produce a richer understanding of why car sharing works. Equally, the case of car sharing sheds unique light onto key contemporary debates in transport policy.

This paper brings car sharing and transport policy scholarship into explicit conversation with the dual objectives of (1) offering an expanded perspective on the need for transport policy to facilitate and guide the initiation and ongoing development of successful car sharing and (2) contributing to ongoing debates about the nature of sustainable transport policies. Using insights from practice approaches to social life, critical analyses of transport policy and theories of urban governance, we undertake a critical examination of the planning and regulation of car sharing. We begin with an outline of the empirical case that is explored in the paper: local government responses to, and shaping of, car sharing in Sydney—Australia's largest city. Transport in Sydney remains characterised by high levels of automobile dependence (Mees, 2012), yet the city has also recently experienced phenomenal growth in car sharing (SGS Economics and Planning, 2012). We then bring car sharing and transport policy into conversation in two sections that combine theory and empirics: first through practice, and second through public–private partnership. Our paper concludes with a discussion of the ways this unique analysis contributes to ongoing debates about the broader contours of transport governance.