Car Sharing in Rome: Built Environment, Management, Research and Innovation

Although a “niche” measure, Car Sharing (CS) in Rome proved to be popular and therefore worthy of a city-wide upscale. This prompted the municipal CS operator to develop an expansion plan to make the service available even in the remotest residential areas within a few years. The “Sapienza” University of Rome, responsible for this development plan, had a two-pronged goal: first, to study current and past operations and appraise whether (and how) CS could be successfully transferred to the outskirts; second, to assess the environmental benefits thus far achieved as a way to increase CS attractiveness in a city where the dominant mode of transportation is still the privately owned car. The main findings and the methodology applied in the Rome case study are presented, focusing on what turned out to be an essential factor to assess the transferability of CS to a new area, i.e., the role played by the built environment, as well as the operational thresholds required to start operating the