Car sharing: is now the time to give up owning a vehicle?

theguardian.com:

It has been two years since Richard Scarborough ditched his ageing diesel vehicle in favour of using car clubs, and the 60-year-old graphic designer from Hackney says he can’t see himself ever going back.

In Oxford, Emily Kerr is part of a carshare in which 20 households share seven neighbour-owned vehicles. She is so delighted with the way it has gone that she has started helping others set up similar schemes.

Scarborough and Kerr are among the growing number of people who have found that it is perfectly possible to get around without owning the car they drive by hiring or sharing one an hour at a time.

“Most cars sit unused for the vast majority of the time, so it makes perfect sense for communities to share them,” Kerr says. “It’s better for the environment, and it’s certainly better for your bank balance.”

It has been six months since she set up ShareOurCars in east Oxford and she says it is hard to imagine how it could have gone better. Hers is a “closed loop” carshare scheme, meaning only those who live locally can use it, provided they don’t have a poor driving history.

The group partnered with the carshare provider hiyacar, which vets new entrants, provides the online booking system, and the all-important insurance. The cars are owned by individual members of the scheme.

Two months into the project, Kerr sold the family Honda SUV to use the shared vehicles instead.

“There are five cars all less than five minutes’ walk from my house,” she says. “If I need to use a car, I log on and book it, paying about £7 a hour for short hops – less an hour for longer drives. We have a WhatsApp group to talk to each other. And if I needed to get a car in an emergency, I’d be very surprised if I couldn’t get one straight away.”

She says