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Today, Communauto inaugurated on Le Plateau-Mont-Royal borough, the first 100% electric one-way carsharing service in Canada. As of today, some twenty vehicles will be available to citizens for trips from a point A to a point B, by simply passing an OPUS card previously registered in the Auto-mobile system.

The aim of the pilot project is to evaluate the benefits and impacts of such a service.

“The public consultation held on June 11th, about one-way carsharing, confirms the need to better document the effects this service will have on citizen’s mobility and on other transportation services, while taking into account Montreal realities. We believe such a system should be positioned as to complement the existing service offer for short trips rather than placing it in competition with other sustainable transportation actors such as taxis, the STM, BIXI and carsharing with reservation,” said Benoît Robert, CEO of Communauto.

“Le Plateau-Mont-Royal is delighted Communauto has chosen the borough for its pilot project. We have no doubt that this new service will be enthusiastically received by our residents, already exemplary in their transportation choices, at an unparalleled degree in the country. The use of a car is essential at times and Auto-mobile, in addition to traditional carsharing, offers maximum benefits with minimal disruptions for its users and for the society. For its part, the borough has commissioned a universal parking permit to minimize the constraints relative to parking the cars near the user’s destination,” added Luc Ferrandez, mayor of Le Plateau-Mont-Royal borough.

“We want to know the effects of such a project on Montrealers’ travel habits. The environmental gains could be very significant on our greenhouse gas effects and air contaminants, if this service replaces gas-powered vehicle trips. As well as the use of urban space, if users get rid of their second car,” says Daniel Bouchard, head of campaigns at the Conseil régional de l’environnement of Montreal.

Research is supported by various partners including researchers of the Mobilité Chair who will conduct surveys with the users and Taxi Diamond, the biggest provider of service for taxi allocation that will provide its point of view and data relative to taxi use. The Conseil régional de l’environnement also supports Communauto in this process. The embedded technology and software are provided by VU LOG CarSharing, a French SME.

For more information, see http://www.communauto.com/auto-mobile.

Author: Zach Shaner

On Tuesday the Seattle City Council Transportation Committee (Rasmussen, Harrell, Godden) approved Car2Go’s request for expansion. In his testimony to the council, Car2Go’s Walter Rosencranz specifically cited the influence of social media and ‘local blogs’ in making requests to expand the service area. In its first 90 days, Car2Go has enrolled 18,000 Seattle members, triple the number typically seen in other cities during that time.

The proposed new home area is exciting and sensible.

Read the full story at http://seattletransitblog.com/2013/03/13/transportation-committee-approves-car2go-expansion/.

Author: Daniel Terdiman

Last week, the Austin City Council ruled that services built around drivers charging riders a fee without the appropriate license were illegal and constituted a crime. That meant that SideCar drivers, who are expected to be prowling the streets of the Texas capital during SXSW this week, risked getting arrested.

SideCar is built around letting drivers who have extra seats in their cars make a little money by picking up riders, who use the company’s app to call for a lift. The service is similar to that available in a number of cities, like Lyft.

Today, SideCar announced that in an attempt to keep its drivers from risking being charged with a crime, it was making all rides free during SXSW.

That decision was, the company said, merely a stop-gap, since it doesn’t consider its service illegal.

Read the full story at http://news.cnet.com/8301-14013_3-57573167/to-avoid-the-cops-sidecar-making-all-sxsw-rides-free.

Author: Dana Budzaj

A new, two-wheel “green” alternative is available for pedestrians commuting around campus this fall with the launch of the university’s bicycle rental program, Blue Bikes.

Thirty blue bicycles, featuring a “blue bike” decal, are available to students, faculty and staff for daily, weekend and semester rentals. Rates begin at $5 for a daily rental, $11 for the weekend and $75 for the semester. The bikes are available at two campus locations: Outdoor Adventures and the North Campus Recreational Building.

Operated by Outdoor Adventures within Recreational Sports, the program was developed in collaboration with Parking & Transportation Services, the Office of Campus Sustainability and the University Planner’s Office.

Read the full story at http://www.ur.umich.edu/update/archives/120912/bikes.

A new study from l’École Polytechnique de Montréal, published in the International Journal of Sustainable Transportation (see study), compares for the first time the households that subscribe to a carsharing service with the households that own one or several cars, in the same neighbourhoods of Montreal and with similar socio-demographic profiles.

Respecting the user proportions according to their usage frequency of the service, the study found that households of one or two adults who subscribe to carsharing use the car 3.7 times less for their daily trips during the week than a similar Montreal household with one vehicle. In fact, people living alone use the car for only 17% of their trips when they are active subscribers of Communauto, compared to 64% for people owning a vehicle. For households with two adults, the usage rate of the car is of 14% for carsharing users and 52% for similar Montreal households owning one vehicle and of 78% for those owning two vehicles.

Read the full story at http://actualites.communauto.com/en/2012/08/30/study-carsharing/.

Author: Ingrid Lunden

The ridesharing-disruptive car service space in the U.S. is about to get a little more crowded: Carpooling.com, a ridesharing service out of Munich, Germany currently enabling million rides monthly, is today announcing a C-round of investment from carmaker Daimler, which it will be using to expand to the other side of the Atlantic starting in the fourth quarter of this year. Financial terms of the investment have not been disclosed but TechCrunch has heard from a reliable source that it is €8 million ($10 million).

The deal makes Daimler a strategic investor in the company. Other existing investors include the European VC firm Earlybird, which has invested in the company’s previous two rounds, as well as Carpooling.com’s founders.

Carpooling.com’s entry into the U.S. comes at a time when services like Uber are expanding fast, and carsharing services that compete more directly with Carpooling are just starting to take off, too. Zimride in April said it had clocked up 26,000 carpools among 350,000 registered users. If Carpooling.com can grow at the same pace as it has done in the 40 countries, covering four million registered users, where it already operates, that would make it potentially a very strong competitor for Zimride. However, a spokesperson notes that in reality it’s great that Zimride exists to help establish the market. “Our real competitors are train companies and other public transport providers,” she noted.

Read the full article at http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/26/carpooling-daimler-carwars.