UC Irvine Institute of Transportation Studies

Growing concerns about petroleum dependence, greenhouse gas emissions, and traffic congestion make shared-use vehicle programs look increasingly attractive. They offer an alternative to car ownership that yields benefits to their members by lowering the cost of transportation and to society at-large by reducing per capita VMT and increasing the use of public transportation. While neighborhood carsharing programs have already received a lot of attention, station car programs, the other type of shared-use vehicle program, largely have not. In the station car approach, shared vehicles are based at public transportation terminals to “extend” the public transportation network. This paper analyzes responses to a survey of the users of UC-Irvine’s ZEV•NET research program, which employs battery electric vehicles and is managed using information technologies. We find that ZEV•NET users participate in the program because they like the flexibility, the ease of use, and the reliability of ZEV•NET vehicles. ZEV•NET commuters are also more concerned about travel stress, cost, and environmental impacts than those who drive alone. By contrast, the latter place greater value in flexibility, reliability, and to a lesser degree, time. Moreover, the demographic characteristics of ZEV•NET users are not statistically different from those of non-users. As ZEV•NET users are not much more concerned about environmental issues than non-users, just advertising the environmental impacts of this program would not be sufficient to grow ZEV•NET; instead, potential cost advantages should be emphasized. These findings should be useful for designing more station car programs that rely on zero-emitting vehicles.