Car co-ops: was Re: [sustran] intro

[Paul Barter]

Tracey Axelson said:
>Car sharing is an organized system of shared car ownership,  access and
>cost, in a 1-car-to-10 person ratio.  It enhances both the social and
>economic well-being of the individual and the community.
.......
>The economics of auto
>ownership as it now stands reinforces the separation of car costs into two
>realms:  the cost of owning and the cost of using.  This means after
>financing the sticker price, buying insurance, tires, and parking, plus
>paying any maintenance bills, the owner dissociates these expenses and
>thinks getting to the hockey game will cost only the gas to get there and
>parking if he can't find a free spot.

You may be interested to hear that Singapore has very recently started to
experiment with the car-sharing/car-cooperatives idea.  I seem to have lost
the newspaper cutting on this. But apparently the trades union congress is
taking a lead on it and they sent a team to Europe and Britain to examine
the successful schemes there.

I don't have details but their motivations seem to be two-fold.
1.  Singapore's Land Transport Authority is concerned that having made the
"sunk costs" of car ownership incredibly high they have inadvertently given
car owners a big incentive to use their expensice asset as much as
possible. So they are now trialing electronic road-pricing to get more of
the costs into the usage.They may see car-cooperatives as another way of
charging for usage rather than for ownership.
2.  Singapore's middle class is getting frustrated that cars are so
expensive. So this car coop. idea may be one way the government hopes to
satisfy the desire to give access to cars without causing an explosion in
car use for commuting and congestion??

It will be very interesting to see how this idea works in a situation of
low car ownership.  Singapore has just over 100 cars per 1000 people,
compared to about 400-450 in western European cities or 500 to 600 in many
North American cities.

Does anyone have details on the Singapore scheme? Are there any others in
the region, say in Japan? Can car-cooperatives ever be a majority thing?

A. Rahman Paul Barter
Sustainable Transport Action Network for Asia & the Pacific (SUSTRAN)
c/- AP2000,  PO Box 12544,  50782 Kuala Lumpur,  Malaysia.
Fax: +60 3 253 2361,  E-mail: tkpb at barter.pc.my