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Rural communities promising market for car sharing scheme
Dutch non-profit car sharing organisation Wheels4all aims at rural communities. Winterswijk is the most recent gain in the list of communities working with the organisation.
For lack of efficient public transport in rural areas the number of ‘second cars’ in rural communities is very high. Green-minded enthousiasts spotted the opportunity for a car sharing scheme aimed at small and medium-sized rural communities and started Wheels4all in 2003. Last month, the Dutch car sharing organisation celebrated its first lustre.
The community gathers around the car
Wheels4all started out as a cooperation, but in five years time grew so fast it recently underwent an organisational reform. Instead of six cars for forty members, as in the early stages, Wheels4all now owns over a hundred cars and has over fourteen hundred members.
Neighbourhood cars
The Wheels4all scheme is called ‘the neighbourhood car’. For every seven applications within a neighbourhood, the organisation provides a car. On average, every Wheels4all car makes five other cars superfluous and saves five parking spaces. The cars are all environmentally friendly.
Profit
Although Wheels4all works on a non-profit basis, there is a profit to be made. This month it was in the Dutch news that anyone in the Netherlands driving less than eight thousand kilometres a year would profit from car hiring or sharing instead of car owning. Reason for Wheels4all to be optimistic about the future, for people introduced to the car sharing scheme tend to start calculating first.
Practical
Except for questions about the costs, most questions asked are about practical use: What if I need a car right away? What are the chances of no car being available? What if I get caught up in traffic and cannot return the car in time?
But the organisation is very flexible and easy to reach. Users simply call and something can often be arranged on the spot. Or they get the advise to, for instance, take a bus to the nearest available car. And with the organisation growing, more and more cars become available.
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Highlight: Winterswijk Wheels4all cooperates with local authorities, for instance in municipal information sessions for citizens. This month, the municipality of Winterswijk introduced the neighbourhood car. The modest goal is to start out with two cars. Ten possible applicants visited the local information evening on May 27th. “That may not be many people, but the evening was a success nevertheless,” comments Geert-Jan Verzijden, who works with the municipality. “We had a few applicants the very same evening.” Including Verzijden himself – he proves to be a real enthusiast, and not just personally. Local policy “Wheels4all fits our local policy: it is a non-profit organisation, there will be less – and cleaner – cars on the road, which means less pollution and less parking pressure – which is considerable in our city centre. The reduced number of cars on the road is not a direct result of the sharing alone: people participating in car sharing schemes also tend to make less use of cars at their disposal because they are confrontated more directly with the costs of driving. As a municipality, we strongly support all of this. To show our allegiance, it was one of our aldermans who opened the evening. The city council will also send out a press release and is considering sending door-to-door information to draw attention to the initiative. The municipality is looking into joining the scheme themselves as well. As of last year we try to do more in the field of sustainable mobility, but we’re a small community of 29,000 inhabitants. Alternative fuels, for instance, are hardly available in the area. Furthermore it takes time to change people’s attitudes towards mobility, especially in smaller communities where people are less used to experimenting with new schemes like this than in large cities.” |
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