This Car-Sharing App Is Better for the Environment Than Uber

When you think about your preferred methods of transportation, not many of you may take into account how you are impacting the world. You might have a personal car, use public transportation or maybe even use a ride-sharing app such as Uber or Lyft. While we already know that public transportation is the most sustainable form of transportation of those three options, not many people want to double their transportation time. What’s the next best thing? Carpooling.

A new study by UC Berkeley Transportation Sustainability Research Center finds that for every shared car the company puts on the road, possibly up to 11 are taken off. Susan Shaheen, a Berkeley professor specializing in transportation study, is publishing her team’s evaluation of the one-way, car-sharing company, Car2go.

Shaheen via Time explains, “We had access to an unprecedented data set where we were really able to ask all the questions we wanted to ask.” Some of this data included which transportation modes people were using before they began the service and how their preferred methods of transportation have changed due to the service.

Shaheen believes that even under the most conservative assumptions, the results of the study show that Car2go helps get more cars off the road than on. Some of these “results” include “notable reductions” in greenhouse gas emissions and inspiring people not to buy personal vehicles when they have the option of sharing cars.

Unlike other car rental companies, which have users pick up and drop off a shared car at a designated place, Car2go users have access to a car which they can then drop off anywhere within any given zone of a city. The study focused on users in five North American cities — Calgary, San Diego, Seattle, Vancouver, and Washington, D.C. As previously stated, Shaheen’s research team found that for every shared car Car2go puts the road, an average of seven to 11 personal vehicles are unused. In addition, Shaheen found that the average user cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent just by using the service.

With so many factors playing into how different modes of transportation affect a city, options like Car2go are becoming more attractive. The report shows that “one-way ride-sharing is an important strategy toward giving people an alternative to car ownership,” Shaheen says. The next time you want to avoid traffic or go out for a safe night of drinking, consider the environmental impact of your preferred method of transportation. Your choice could either be incredibly damaging or monumentally helpful to our planet’s health.