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Kimberly King

Apr 10, 2014
09:21

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I have been an ardent supporter of car sharing since 2006 when I ditched my VW Jetta and opted to find ways to lower my carbon footprint by using FlexCar [now ZipCar] car sharing, bicycling, walking, mass transpo, and carpooling. I think this study proposition should also include investigating CO2 emissions for car sharing during 'peak' and 'off-peak' times.

Vantte Kentta

May 21, 2014
06:33

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Big fan of the sharing economy! Keep up the good work! The Internet-enabled sharing economy is reducing the inefficiencies of daily life and turning them into opportunities. Innovative companies have sprung up to fill capacity that would otherwise go unused, whether an empty bed, a shared car, or spare seat at a dinner table. For a clearer picture, here are some numbers about car-sharing, pooling, in the US by 2020; 4 million will share cars & there will be 1.2 million less cars on the roads and parking lots. http://www.fastcoexist.com/3027275/car-sharing-means-there-are-already-500000-fewer-vehicles-on-the-road?partner=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fastcoexist%2Ffeed+%28Co.Exist%29 This is a major disruption of business as usual. But not only governments, cities and municipalities lack this information, also car manufacturers lack it, sadly. Today, there are millions of unsold cars. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-05-16/where-worlds-unsold-cars-go-die On top of these facts also a very interesting fact emerges from the excess capacity of freight in general; sea containers and trucks. On average 20% of the containers transported on sea, and 40% transported on land are empty. Not only is car-sharing, pooling, impacting every aspect of transportation, but it could also be the forefront in creating the first zero carbon international freight start-up. This would be exciting indeed! There is a very difficult question in Green Economics, how to transport goods from one continent to another without a environmental footprint. This could very well be the start in answering that question. As can well be seen, these questions and facts represent a huge economic disruptions, and should there fore interest economy students, professors, entrepreneurs and policy makers. As can be seen from the unsold cars, large amounts of money (and resources) is being wasted as we speak. But those who posses sufficient data stand to gain large amounts of money. As a conclusion, when musing on these facts it becomes a mystery why we don´t have a booming business of start-up consultancy firms that calculate these numbers and provide FACTS for paying customers (car manufacturers, cities, governments, municipalities). Cheers!

Climate Colab

Aug 5, 2014
08:31

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The authors just propose the development of a study about car sharing in order to understand the potential impacts of this action, without any valuable improvement/innovation. Rather than being a proposal, this is simply the outline of a standard study