The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Holding Car Sharing Back
Key Takeaways
- Car sharing's potential is being suppressed by policy barriers, cultural inertia, and subsidies for private car ownership.
- The absence of a transformative exemplar for car sharing is a symptom of that suppression, not evidence of a ceiling.
- Decision-makers consistently overlook car sharing due to unfamiliarity; it fits neither the pro-car nor the multimodal agenda, lacks a powerful advocacy base, and falls outside the lived experience of most people with the power to support it.
- Governments that treat car sharing as a private sector problem to be taxed and regulated into submission are prioritising the optics of not helping a business over the substance of achieving their own stated objectives on emissions and car dependency.
- Dismissing car sharing because it involves cars mistakes a powerful lever for reducing private vehicle ownership for an obstacle to that goal.
- Car sharing is genuinely complex to design and deliver well, but that complexity is not an excuse to continue to defer it in favour of other priorities.
- Grouping car sharing with ridehail and micro-mobility under a shared mobility banner obscures the distinction that car sharing competes with private vehicle ownership itself, whereas other shared modes do not.
- Car sharing consistently loses the battle for attention to newer, shinier transport technologies.
- The challenges that autonomous vehicles will face in shifting people from ownership to access models are precisely the challenges car sharing faces today; overlooking car sharing now means arriving at that future less prepared.
What Next?
Are you doing enough to maximise the potential of car sharing?
Introduction
I have a confession to make. Despite being a genuine believer in car sharing's potential, I keep overlooking it. When I lived in London, I not only held direct responsibility for car-sharing policy as a Councillor, but I also gave up my own car because car sharing made that possible. And yet, when someone recently called me out for consistently neglecting the topic in my writing, I could not honestly argue with them.
That moment of self-reflection led me to a more interesting question. It is not just me. Across the transport profession, among planners, decision-makers, academics, and advocates, car sharing consistently fails to get the attention its potential warrants. Why?
The timing of that question feels particularly important. As autonomous vehicles emerge, the stakes around car sharing are rising. If AVs default to private ownership, we will have turbocharged the existing problem. If instead we can shift the default toward shared autonomous vehicles, the benefits could be transformational. But that outcome will not happen on its own. And if we have not yet worked out how to make conventional car sharing succeed, we are poorly placed to get shared AVs right either.
This blog sets out seven reasons why car sharing keeps getting overlooked. Understanding the problem is the first step. In a future post, I will turn to what we can actually do about it.
Problem 1 β There is no car sharing exemplar
One of the most powerful forces in transport policy is the existence of places that prove what is possible. Hong Kong demonstrates what a world-class metro system looks like. Amsterdam and Copenhagen show what happens when cycling is taken seriously. These exemplars are important; they inspire decision-makers and advocates and help to defeat sceptics.
Car sharing has no equivalent. There are places where it has gained meaningful traction; Belgium, for instance, has 6.3 shared cars per 10,000 people, but nowhere has it achieved the kind of transformative, visible impact required to inspire.
Without an exemplar, car sharing is easy to dismiss as a niche product with a ceiling, useful for a particular type of urban resident, but never likely to fundamentally change how a city moves. And if that is the assumption, the logical response is to treat it as a minor footnote in transport planning rather than a serious lever for change.
But is that assumption correct? I do not think so. The more likely explanation is that car sharing's potential is being actively suppressed by a combination of three compounding problems.
The first is direct policy barriers: fragmented regulation, punitive parking charges, and onerous compliance requirements that make it harder to operate and harder to scale. The second is cultural. Car ownership carries social meaning that car sharing cannot match, and in a world where private car ownership is the norm, car sharing still feels unfamiliar to most people. That said, cultures are not fixed. Cycling was a fringe mode in London and Paris not long ago. Sustained investment and normalisation changed that. There is no reason to assume car sharing is different in principle.
The third, and perhaps most structurally important, is that car sharing does not compete on a level playing field. It competes primarily with private car ownership, a mode that is subsidised at almost every turn through cheap or free parking, underpriced roads, and planning systems built around the assumption of car ownership. Car sharing, like public transport, is not operating in a free market. It is operating in a market that has been tilted heavily against it.
Together, these three forces create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Car sharing is suppressed, so it fails to achieve transformative scale, so decision-makers and researchers treat it as a niche, so it receives less attention and fewer resources, so it remains suppressed. Breaking that cycle starts with recognising it.
Problem 2 β Decision-makers do not know what they do not know
Even where car sharing is not actively obstructed by policy, it faces a quieter but equally damaging problem: it simply does not register on the radar of the people with the power to support it.
Transport decision-makers rely heavily on advisors to shape their priorities. Those advisors are working through crowded inboxes, pressure to build more car parks, to fix failing bus services, to deliver cycling infrastructure.
This is compounded by a structural misfit with the way transport politics tends to organise itself. Decision-makers broadly fall into two camps: those who are pro-car, and those who favour a multimodal approach. Car sharing fits awkwardly into both. Pro-car decision-makers are focused on private vehicle ownership and the infrastructure that serves it. Multimodal decision-makers tend to reach instinctively for cycling and public transport. Car sharing is neither fish nor fowl, and so it tends to fall through the gap between the two.
There is also a more fundamental issue of lived experience. In a private car-dominated world, many decision-makers have spent their entire adult lives owning a car. The idea of deliberately not owning one and instead relying on access to a shared vehicle when needed is simply outside their frame of reference. It is difficult to champion something you have never used and cannot easily imagine using.
Finally, car sharing lacks the organised advocacy base that other modes can draw on. Cycling has passionate, vocal communities in most cities. The automotive industry has enormous lobbying power. Car sharing has neither. It has no equivalent of the cycling lobby pushing its case in council chambers, and no industry giant with the resources to shift political opinion. In the competition for decision-maker attention, it is consistently outgunned.
The result is a mode that is overlooked due to unfamiliarity, which, in some ways, makes the problem harder to solve. You can push back against active opposition. It is much harder to fight your way onto an agenda when you are not even part of the conversation.
Problem 3 β The private sector problem
Car sharing occupies an uncomfortable position in the political economy of transport. In most cities, it is delivered by private operators, companies that need to turn a profit to survive. For many governments, that fact alone is enough to put barriers in place.
The logic, such as it is, runs something like this: if a private company is involved, it is their problem to solve. It is not the government's job to help a business make money. And if that business does make money, the instinct is often to capture as much of it as possible through fees, charges, and levies rather than to ask what conditions would allow it to grow.
This approach is wrong, for a straightforward reason: the outcomes that car sharing can deliver: reduced car ownership, lower emissions, less pressure on parking and road space are precisely the outcomes that governments say they want. A government that refuses to create the conditions for car sharing to thrive, on the grounds that doing so might benefit a private operator, is prioritising not helping a business over the substance of achieving its own policy objectives.
Problem 4 β Making the perfect the enemy of the good
Not all opposition to car sharing comes from indifference. Some of it comes from people who care deeply about transport outcomes and that, paradoxically, makes it harder to address.
Within the transport reform community, there is a strand of thinking that treats any car-based solution as inherently problematic. This view holds that anything involving a car, even a shared one, is, at best, a distraction. Car sharing, on this reading, legitimises car use rather than displacing it.
There is a surface logic to this position. It is true that some car share trips replace journeys that might otherwise have been made by foot, bike, or public transport. But car sharing is a net positive. It reduces private vehicle ownership, decreases the total number of cars on the road, and leads to an overall increase in walking, cycling, and public transport use. The systemic benefits vastly outweigh the occasional substituted bus trip.
Problem 5 β Car sharing is genuinely hard to get right
Car sharing is complicated to deliver well and poorly understood at the same time, a combination that makes it easy to deprioritise and difficult to champion.
Car sharing does not have a standard playbook. There is no equivalent of the design guides, procurement frameworks, or established best practice that transport professionals can reach for when making the case for investment. The result is that even decision-makers and planners who are sympathetic to car sharing often struggle to translate that sympathy into action. The path from recognising car sharing's potential to actually delivering something is genuinely unclear.
Part of the complexity is that car sharing is not a single thing. The differences between station-based and free-floating models, between urban and suburban contexts, between high-density and low-density catchments, are not minor variations on a common theme. This context-dependence makes it harder to make confident recommendations.
The practical questions that need to be resolved before a scheme can succeed are also genuinely contested. How should on-street parking spaces allocated to car sharing be priced? Who bears the political cost of reallocating kerb space, a decision that will generate opposition from some residents regardless of how it is handled? Which tier of government should set the regulatory framework, and which should manage day-to-day operations? Where does car sharing sit within a transport organisation, under parking, public transport, or roads, and what happens when it falls between all three?
The absence of settled answers means that car sharing frequently ends up in what might be called the too-hard basket.
Problem 6 - Being lumped in with other parts of shared transport
Car sharing is frequently bundled together with other forms of shared transport, ridehail, bike share, e-scooters under the broad umbrella of shared mobility. On the surface, this seems reasonable. These are all services that involve sharing access to a vehicle rather than owning one outright. But the grouping obscures more than it reveals and, in doing so, consistently undersells what car sharing can actually achieve.
The problem is that shared mobility is not a homogeneous category. The different modes within it behave very differently in terms of who uses them, for what trips, and, critically, what they replace. Treating them as broadly equivalent leads to policy frameworks, transport hierarchies, and planning tools that lump them together in ways that distort the picture.
Take ridehail. The evidence on ridehail is fairly consistent: it competes primarily with public transport for many journeys, particularly in dense urban areas where alternatives are readily available. In many cities, it has increased vehicle kilometres travelled and drawn passengers away from buses and trains.
Bike share and e-scooter share tell a different story again. These modes often compete with short car trips and ridehail rather than with private vehicle ownership.
In contrast, car sharing's primary competitive relationship is with private vehicle ownership. The evidence consistently shows that car share members reduce their personal vehicle ownership, drive fewer kilometres overall, and shift a significant proportion of their trips to walking, cycling, and public transport.
When car sharing is grouped with ridehail and micro-mobility under a single shared mobility banner, this distinction gets lost. Car sharing deserves to be evaluated on its own terms with policy frameworks designed around what it actually does rather than what it superficially resembles.
Problem 7 β Losing the battle for attention
Even if car sharing could overcome every other problem on this list, it would still face one final challenge: the competition for attention is brutal, and car sharing is consistently losing it.
Transport is not short of big ideas. The transition to electric vehicles has consumed enormous political and professional bandwidth over the past decade. Autonomous vehicles have generated a wave of anticipation, anxiety, and speculation that shows no signs of abating. The pipeline of emerging technologies and novel concepts competing for attention in transport circles is long and constantly refreshed.
Car sharing has none of the properties that make these topics magnetic. It does not involve cutting-edge technology. It does not promise to reshape cities overnight or generate the kind of breathless coverage that attracts political interest and research funding.
The consequences are real. Policy teams allocate their limited capacity to the issues at the top of the political agenda. Consultants and advisors develop expertise in areas where client demand is strongest. In each of these domains, car sharing loses out.
There is a particular irony here. The technologies that attract the most attention, most obviously autonomous vehicles, will face precisely the same structural challenges that car sharing faces today if they default to private ownership models. The question of how to shift people from owning vehicles to accessing them on demand is not a problem that AVs will solve automatically. It is a problem that needs to be solved deliberately, using the tools of policy, regulation, and behaviour change. Car sharing is, in many ways, the testing ground for that challenge. Overlooking it in favour of shinier downstream technology means arriving at that future without the knowledge and institutional capacity needed to navigate it well.
Conclusion
Car sharing sits in a strange place in our transport ecosystem. It has genuine potential to reduce private car ownership, cut emissions, and shift travel behaviour, yet it keeps getting pushed to the back of the queue. As this blog has explored, this is the result of compounding problems, from policy barriers and cultural inertia to the way we think about shared mobility, which simply fails to account for what car sharing actually does.
The frustrating irony is that many of these problems are self-reinforcing. Car sharing remains niche partly because decision-makers ignore it, and decision-makers ignore it partly because it remains niche.
The good news is that none of these barriers are insurmountable. We have seen cultures shift around cycling in cities like London and Paris. We have seen private sector mobility solutions scale when given the right regulatory environment. There is no fundamental reason car sharing cannot follow a similar trajectory, but it will not happen by default.
In a future blog, I will look at what needs to change: the policy levers, the advocacy gaps, and the practical steps that could allow car sharing to punch at its actual weight.
If you want to be part of that conversation, the Transport Reform Network has a working group focused on exactly this challenge. Get in touch at russell@transportlc.org.