Tag Archives: car clubs

A celebration of car club collaboration

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On 24 May, over twenty guests from around Oxfordshire and further afield came together at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, to celebrate a year-long, multi-operator pilot of electric car clubs in market towns and villages across the county.

In just twelve months, the shared EVs put over 165,000 electric miles on the clock – saving 36 tons of CO2eq (almost 8 Olympic sized swimming pools) compared to if those miles driven in the average petrol car. The shared EVs are already spending an average of 12% of their time in motion – compared to 4% for the average private vehicle. More efficient and intensive use of EVs means fewer EVs are needed for people to get around, which at 100 kg CO2eq per kWh of battery capacity manufactured, means even more emissions savings!

The clubs also attracted almost 1,000 new car club members / users and more than 3,000 individual hiring sessions in shared EVs outside Oxford City, with some members / users reporting that they have been able to reduce their household car ownership as a result.

Thus, despite doubts about viability outside cities, two of the car club operators believe that a dozen shared EVs will continue to operate in the various towns and villages indefinitely – and there has been discussion about expansion.

And with officers from Buckinghamshire, Kent, and Suffolk in attendance, as well as a high turnout from the Councillors, officers, and operators involved in the Oxfordshire pilot, there’s plenty of interest in the potential of electric car clubs in rural areas.

Considering that cars and vans are responsible for 30-50% of CO2 emissions in rural districts of the UK and public transport in such places is often limited, electric car clubs could offer rural residents a more affordable, efficient and environmentally friendly way to drive an EV. Yet there have been doubts about whether those rural residents will be interested, whether car clubs are viable to operate outside cities, and if there are any unintended long-term impacts.

The Oxfordshire pilot shows that at least in terms of interest and viability, the answer in some of the locations was definitely yes! Indeed, the evaluation findings of the pilot that my policy partner from Oxfordshire County Council, Jenny Figueiredo, and I presented at the celebratory event were based on annualised figures. Utilisation at the more successful locations grew over the course of the year, so in those cases, it’s only getting better!

The carbon savings are also likely an underestimate, as operators were using cleaner than average energy at the local charging hubs and from off-grid sources. In terms of the former, over 10% of energy sold at some of the hubs over the course of the year was to the car clubs – showing that, especially in less densely-populated areas, charge point and car club operation – and business cases – can be complementary.

That said, it is important to caveat that the car clubs in some locations were withdrawn, and we don’t fully understand the place-specific barriers and success factors, business models and narratives needed to meaningfully scale EV sharing in the countryside.

Our attendees agreed that funding, raising awareness, and further research was needed, but they were also incredibly positive about the potential of rural electric car clubs. From accelerating decarbonisation to financial opportunities for both operators and households, the future of electric car clubs in our market towns and villages is looking bright!

Making sense of policy mixes

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Policy mixes are the complex arrangement of objectives or goals and the instruments or measures devised to achieve them. They are not policy processes, although they develop over time, as outputs from ongoing political and technocratic processes and cycles. They are not policy strategies, although strategy documents often contain lists of goals and references to instruments.
Policy mixes cannot be found in one document – their component parts are spread across strategies and funding bids, guidance and even press releases. Policy mixes are not the responsibility of any individual policymaker – the expertise and resources to prioritise goals and to design and deliver the instruments lie with an array of teams at different levels of governance and across private and third sector, as well as public sector organisations.
Thus, compiling the policy mixes for the electrification of private and shared passenger transport in Bristol and its hinterland was a challenging task. We identified thirty individual policy instruments and grouped them, with some duplication where appropriate, by four modes: private vehicles (including those used for business and taxis), car-sharing, e-bikes, and e-scooters. Each instrument was categorised and listed with its intended goals; its spatial extent and timescale; and its consideration of the distributional, recognition, and participation dimensions of social justice.
The resulting spreadsheet was described as impressive or intimidating – or both! Explaining its contents at our third policy and governance workshop for the ITEM project was not simple. And this despite the fact that all eleven participants were involved with developing policy strategies and goals or implementing policy instruments or lobbying for policy improvements on behalf of particular user groups.
Nonetheless, we not only explained it, but asked the participants to score the policy mixes according to the complementarity of instruments, the coherence of goals, the alignment between instruments and goals, and the implications for distribution, recognition and participation for each mode and all modes together. Academics have attempted to undertake this sort of task to better analyse how policy has driven or could better drive change. We wanted to go one step further and not just analyse as academics, but also encourage action among policymakers. So we guided our participants through the task. We asked them to consider how they could consciously and strategically improve the policy mixes.
One rewarding result of taking this approach was through our work – and our excessively small-print spreadsheet – they could see that lots of great initiatives were happening in Bristol. Their views were broadly positive that the policy mixes showed consistent goals, with instruments reinforced more than undermined, and that whilst more could be added, there was not so much to take away.
Admittedly, the scores for the justice implications were lower – not all the policy mixes were evenly distributed nor recognised every social grouping nor, in particular, enabled much participation or influence in their planning and implementation. Here was room for improvement: finding ways to listen to new voices above the roar from the usual suspects, relying less on digital tools.
As the discussion moved to strengthening the policy mixes, the ever-present spectre of insufficient funding reared its head. Policy instruments and goals might be strategically focused in principle, but if they were not properly funded, then how could they ever extend to all the places and people needed to be just? Could creative distribution of funds help? Just as evaluating policy mixes rather than isolated instruments reveals synergies as well as gaps, so considering how groups rather than individuals are affected could enable recognition of intersecting needs that might be more efficiently met. Likewise, the policy mixes include carrots and sticks. Participants suggested that seeing both on a single page helped them to consider how to match the carrots to where (or whom) the sticks are targeted.
We will be producing a more detailed, structured report of how we evaluated the policy mixes in Bristol and the ideas and recommendations that will accelerate a more inclusive transition to electric mobility in Bristol. But for now, suffice it to say, the first step, making sense of policy mixes together, was completed with a sense of achievement.

A partnership in learning by doing

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Even before the public charging hubs went live across Oxfordshire, the partners involved in their installation wanted to include electric car clubs in the Park and Charge project. Car club operators would be a dedicated, regular customer for manufacturer and operator, EZ-Charge. Car clubs would offer more Oxfordshire residents access to electric driving, whilst avoiding the high purchase costs. Research, including from myself and colleagues, showed that a reduction in car ownership and use as well as electrification was required to meet emissions targets. Car clubs are compatible with a car-lite lifestyle.

Delays and other challenges to the project, partly due to the pandemic, left no budget nor resource to include electric car clubs before the project funding ended in 2022, but the key partners at Oxfordshire County Council, the University of Oxford and EZ-Charge kept the discussion alive.

They involved other parties in their partnership – Oxford City Council, the shared mobility charity CoMoUK, car club operators, Co-Wheels and Enterprise, community green groups from Eynsham and Thame, district council car park operators. They used survey and public engagement data from the Park and Charge project and Co-Wheels. They used messages and research published by CoMoUK. They built on the enthusiasm of local green groups, and the trust established with the district councils during the hub installation.

Out of this partnership working, Oxfordshire County Council negotiated a year-long trial of electric car clubs at a selection of the Park and Charge hubs and Oxford City’s Redbridge Park and Ride. The car club operators would provide the EVs at their own risk. EZ-Charge and the city / districts would dedicate particular parking spaces and charge points for their use. I applied for and won some University of Oxford internal seed funding to support the trial and develop a roadmap for evaluation and maximising outcomes. All involved would promote the new car clubs through their various outreach channels.

A live experiment is underway. These car clubs are innovative in not only being all-electric, but also in being located in towns and villages, away from the dense urban areas where most car clubs are found. Data is being collected on membership, utilisation, and bookings for the car clubs, and energy utilisation at the dedicated charge points. Mini-surveys provide some insight into user motivations and preferences. A public event in May offered publicity to the trial with a more personal touch. In-depth discussions were held with car sharing advocates from Eynsham and Thame, and with two independent car club organisers in Hook Norton and Banbury, who have developed alternative business models.

The trial is half way through the promised year, and already we have insights to share. The availability of electric cars is attractive to potential customers, who say they prefer commercially-run or community car clubs to peer-to-peer options. The most successful electric car clubs in the trial are in towns where car clubs already existed locally or nearby – Henley, at Redbridge, and Abingdon. Eynsham has also taken off surprisingly quickly, perhaps because of the community interest already in place. The trial car club is not attracting many customers in Banbury, perhaps because of the local competition, and negotiations are underway to shift the operations.

A further research-led project is scheduled for spring 2024 to answer policy questions such as: Are the frequency of bookings and number of unique users of these trial car clubs lower than in city car clubs, but the duration of rentals higher, as data on existing Co-Wheels vehicles in areas with lower population density and higher vehicle ownership suggests? Is the utilisation sufficient to support retaining the trial car clubs and perhaps expanding into other towns and villages? Will car club charge point utilisation help support EZ-Charge’s business model, and encourage other charge point operators to welcome car clubs? Do the electric car clubs make electric driving more affordable and accessible?

These questions can be answered as our partnership continues learning by doing.

Silence on Social Justice?

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Bristol was chosen for our case study city for three reasons.

First, in practical terms, we needed a medium-sized British city that would allow comparison with our partner cities across Europe – Oslo, Poznan and Utrecht.

Second, it needed to be somewhere with electric mobility policies and projects to study for social justice implications. Bristol has won a number of UK and European bids funding electric mobility infrastructure and services, either specifically or as part of larger transport packages.

Finally, we thought it might be a positive critical case study – somewhere more likely to be an exemplar of social justice in policy making.

Bristol has a history of civic activism and concern for equity and inclusion. It was home not only to the most significant Black Lives Matter protests in the UK, but also the Bristol bus boycott in 1963, when protesters forced the local bus company to change their discriminatory employment policies. It was not only the first local government authority in the UK to declare a climate emergency, but also the first place women were ordained into the Church of England.

In the transport domain, Sustrans, the charity which created and maintains the National Cycle Network and advocates for walking and cycling was founded in Bristol in 1977. More recently, parents in Bristol who wanted to see their children play in the streets in front of their homes without fear of traffic started the charity Playing Out, which helps residents apply for temporary, but regular road closures.

Could we find evidence of that sort of civic spirit in the transition to electric mobility and the policies designed to support it?

Ten recent, urban policy documents were analysed to find out, including transport and climate strategies and a few UK funding bids with electric mobility elements.

We did not find a suitable document specifically covering the successful European bid that funded the REPLICATE project, but thought the social outcomes of that project would surely be mentioned in policy documents that did make our list. REPLICATE included an e-bike loan scheme and new electric car club bays and was specifically targeted at neighbourhoods with more minority groups and less housing or transport capital.

REPLICATE was mentioned in three of our analysed documents, but as an example of successful delivery, without reference to social outcomes or equity nor if local residents were involved in choosing the bay locations or gave their views on driving the shared electric cars.

My analysis of data provided by Co-Wheels, the car club operator that participated in the project, showed that the e-car club bays installed during the project were located in significantly more deprived areas than other car club bays and used by residents of more deprived areas. An academic involved in the project confirmed to me that the locations were purposefully chosen to increase access to shared electric vehicles among low income residents.

Yet whilst the potential of increased access through EV car clubs is highlighted in the UK Go Ultra Low bid (see page 17), the bid cited REPLICATE only for its synergy with the proposed scheme, not for its inclusivity. All three documents mentioning REPLICATE are strangely silent on the project’s social justice implications.

We found a similar silence on another social justice initiative described in just one document: the One City Plan proposes to apply the recommendations of the citizens’ assembly that was just finishing its deliberations as the Plan was published in March 2021. Yet the two documents we could find published after the One City Plan do not mention the citizen’s assembly at all. Will others yet to be published do more?

Meanwhile, as mentioned in my blog, the Future Mobility Zone bid promises co-production and user-centred design, but there is no knowing from the document itself whether the e-mobility aspects of the bid have been or will be implemented in such a socially just way. We have to use other sources to find out.

Thus, whilst Bristol may still be an exemplar of social justice in terms of civic activism and opportunities for genuine participation, potentially even in ways that relate to electric mobility policy, relevant policy documents are strangely silent on the subject and evidence is thus far missing, particularly of recognition justice and the incorporation of diverse knowledge, values, and practices in the transition to electric mobility.

Interviews with stakeholders come next as our search for evidence of Bristol as a positive critical case study in the inclusive transition to electric mobility (ITEM) continues.

Car clubs coming to you?

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Car clubs fascinate me.

Whilst still cars, car club vehicles are used much more intensively, and the people who use them travel less intensively. It is not a different mode of travel, but car club members use different modes of travel more: they walk, cycle, and ride on buses and trains more often than they drive. The vehicles are more likely to be electric and produce fewer emissions than the average private car. Sharing cars saves space and reduces congestion, greenhouse gas emissions and local air pollution. CoMoUK, the national charity for the public benefit of shared transport, publishes reports on the many benefits of car clubs.

But car clubs also frustrate me. Why? Since car clubs are often designed for those with a car-lite, multimodal lifestyle in mind, they’re rarely found in places where people are most car-dependent nor are necessarily available to people who have the fewest options for getting around.

Let me explain. Most car clubs in the UK are run commercially – they need to be financially viable. Also, the most common model is ‘back-to-base’, which involves a dedicated parking bay on street or in a parking area for each car club vehicle, often requiring a long-term agreement with the local highways authority or workplace or housing estate / developer. Therefore, car club operators want their cars where they will attract customers and be valued by the landowner and local community for some years. Such places tend to be in denser urban areas, or in the car parks owned by larger businesses and institutions, usually where there is a better-educated if not wealthier population who are seeking a more flexible, greener and healthier lifestyle.

This is a bit of a simplification, and CoMoUK has information on all the types of car clubs as well as the less well-known and studied peer-to-peer car sharing options operational in the UK. And as they put it to policy-makers, a shared car is quite simply not the same as a privately-owned car. Car sharing should be supported in transport strategies.

I agree with them, but I also wonder whether a shared car in a dense urban area where people have good public transport can have as much impact as a shared car in a suburb or smaller town with minimal public transport? The latter places contribute to climate change too. They suffer from congestion and air pollution and too many cars taking up too much public space.

But if car sharing were available in smaller settlements, would people give up as many privately-owned cars for shared ones, would they would walk and cycle more, and most importantly, would they provide enough business to make a car club or other car sharing arrangement viable?

There are three recent trends that suggest the answers could be ‘yes’:

  1. Driving Electric: People don’t have to live in dense urban areas to be unable to afford to purchase an electric vehicle, or to not have a place at home to charge it, or to feel motivated by the climate crisis to want to switch sooner rather than later. Working with CoMoUK, I have gathered some evidence of the extra opportunities for electric car sharing in this publication.
  2. Digital Accessibility: Since the pandemic, more people are working flexibly and from home, do not need to use their privately-owned cars to commute, and often live in suburbs and smaller towns. More people are ordering goods and groceries online. Car sharing fits well with flexibility and less frequent essential trips. Good public transport links may no longer be a prerequisite.
  3. Informal Options: People have been sharing cars with friends and family for a long time, but there are now digital platforms that support informal car sharing between community groups, neighbours or even strangers. These offer ways to car-share that don’t have the same fixed costs or location, and can meet more diverse needs in more places.

Research is clearly required – CoMoUK staff and I are keen to take our collaboration forward to find the evidence to help car sharing come to you, wherever you live.

Recognising Recognition Justice

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I am working on a major research project called ITEM: Inclusive Transition to Electric Mobility, where we review who uses electric mobility alongside whether the policies that are supposed to support us all to switch from fossil-fuel powered transport to electric options are socially just.

Now that we’ve had workshops with stakeholders in all four cities where we are conducting our research, it is clear that what we call the recognition aspect of social justice is the one least recognised.

In transport policy-making, distributional justice is usually part of appraising the problem and implementing solutions. Decision-makers often ask who living where suffers from local air pollution or who benefits from a new electric charging station or shared e-bike service. They might even ask whether it’s the same ‘who’.

Procedural justice is also fairly straightforward. Who participates in what gets done in a city and how meaningful is that participation? Officials working at various levels of government may not always involve other sectors and citizens as much as they could or would like to. They may not quite know how to make participation more meaningful, but they get the idea.

But recognition justice? Our participants hadn’t heard of it.

We all explained that it’s about recognising that different people need, want, value or expect different things at different times and for different purposes. And our participants understood, but rarely consider it explicitly. In fact, we could find questions about recognition justice in all our workshops – our participants just didn’t call it that.

Back in our first workshop in Bristol, there was a discussion about who used electric car clubs, for what purposes, and whether they were getting the service they actually wanted and expected. Could these shared vehicles meet the needs of both those who could not afford a car, particularly not an electric one, as well as those who could afford multiple cars, but wanted to reduce their car ownership? These are questions of recognition justice.

At the second workshop in Poznan, Poland, participants spoke not just about users of electric mobility, but also related industries. They considered how there would be automotive workers who needed re-training and other support. They asked how the experience of groups like these would fit with the promotion of environmental values and acceptance of regulations to encourage electric mobility. These are questions of recognition justice.

In Utrecht, the Netherlands, the participants wondered how to manage the rights to and use of public space when users of e-scooters or electric cars, for example, might expect to use that space differently than those on pedal bikes or parking a conventional vehicle. They asked how conflicts between users could be avoided to ensure no one felt excluded from the public spaces where they felt they had a right to be. These are questions of recognition justice.

In the Norwegian workshop, the participants noted that although electric cars are now easy to use around Oslo, that might not mean they are equally easy for everyone. They asked whether charging services, with their assorted infrastructure, pricing, and payment mechanisms (e.g. apps), were what all users might want and understand, or whether they could be seen as neither inclusive nor fair. These are questions of recognition justice.

So many questions of recognition justice, just as there are so many different needs, wants, values, rights and understandings to recognise. Our participants recognise that there are these differences, but may not yet have considered how to find out the detail of what they are and who holds them. As this project progresses, we will be seeking answers, and opening up yet another aspect of justice – ‘epistemic’ or that related to the creation and incorporation of knowledge.