Car sharing management between research and innovation: the Rome case

Car Sharing (CS) is a rental service where members lease cars for short periods. In Rome, CS is typically a “neighborhood” service, exclusively operated by the municipal transit company and available in four central districts. Since its launch in 2005, it proved to be popular and worthy of a city-wide upscale. Consequently, the municipal operator decided to develop an expansion plan to make it available even in the most remote residential areas, according to a two-pronged goal: first, to appraise whether CS could be successfully transferred to the outskirts; second, to assess the environmental benefits thus far achieved. This paper presents the methodology applied to upgrade the service and the key findings. The former started from an in-depth analysis of the service hitherto utilized (a 111-vehicle fleet and about 2,000 members) and the study of the members’ profiles, which led to design a series of performance indicators to identify the most successful locations thus far and consequently the operational thresholds required to start productively implementing the service elsewhere. Among the latter, the role played by the built environment and the members’ habit of walking to the cars turned out to be distinctive features of the service, hence requiring the inclusion of issues such as walkability options and the quality of the built environment to properly assess the transferability of CS to a new area. Moreover, the environmental effects of CS on the community in terms of pollution reduction and the urban space savable from private cars are reported