Comparison of free-floating car-sharing services in cities

In recent years, free-floating car sharing services (FFCS) have been offered by many organizations as a more flexible option compared to traditional car sharing. FFCS allows users to pick up and return cars anywhere within a specified area of a city. FFCS can provide a high degree of utilization of vehicles and less usage of infrastructure in the form of parking lots and roads and thus has the potential to increase the efficiency of the transport sector. However, there is also a concern that these compete with other efficient modes of transport such as cycling and public transport. The aim of this paper is to better understand how, when and where the vehicles are utilized through logged data of the vehicles’ movements. We have access to data collected on FFCS services in 22 cities in Europe and North America which allows us to compare the usage pattern in different cities and examine whether or not there are similar trends. In this paper, we use the collected data to compare the different cities based on utilization rate, length of trip and time of day that the trip is made. We find that the vehicle utilization rates differ between cities with Madrid and Hamburg having some of the highest utilization levels for the FFCS vehicles. The results form a first step of a better understanding on how these services are being used and can provide valuable input to local policy makers as well as future studies such as simulation models.