CAR SHARING

The use of carsharing is increasingly widespread in European cities. Car to go and Emove are some of the companies, which operates in Spain. If you want to use a Carsharing car in your city, you need to have a license driving, download the app and sing up (It use to cost around 9€). within the app you can see available cars around and booked it with 20 minutes in advance.

Once you are near the car, you can open it through the app. The keys are inside the car, and at this moment, you can drive whenever (The trip is paid by used time). Having finished your travel, you can leave your car, even in blues and greens zones.

One advantage of use carsharing is the price. The most common uses are sporadic journeys. Carsharing is payed for minutes and it cost around 20-25 cents. Therefore, a journey of 15 minutes cost around 4€. That means that travel using carsharing would be cheaper than a taxi. However, it would be more expensive than public transport.

One of the main advantages of using carsharing is parking is that once User of carsharing have finished the journey, as previously mentioned, they can leave the car in green zones or blue zones without paying anything.

An additional advantage is that Car to go and Emove are using electric vehicles, so you can drive one of these cars in a restricted day for pollution.

You can think that use a carsharing is only advantages, but you have to consider drawbacks of using carsharing. For example, not always you can find an available car. The availability is irregular and based on demand. It could have high demand slots and you can not find any available car around you.

Another this advantage is that if you want to use one of this smart mobility solution, it depend of your mobile device. You need at least your mobile phone to open/close the car and you must maintain your mobile running along the entry journey.

To sum up, Carsharing is a good option for concrete and sporadic journeys. In contrast, daily or regular use of carsharing could be expensive and you can find a surprise if you need the car for going to the work and you don´t have an available car around you.