Carsharing’s Life-Cycle Impacts on Energy Use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions
By T. Donna Chen, Kara M. Kockelman. 2016
220 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper examines the life-cycle inventory impacts on energy use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as a result of travelers adopting the carsharing mode in U.S. settings where shared-car use is reasonable. Here, households already residing in relatively dense urban neighborhoods with good access to transit and traveling relatively few miles in private vehicles (roughly 10 percent of the U.S. population) are considered good candidates for carsharing. This analysis recognizes the cradle-to-grave impacts of carsharing on vehicle ownership levels, travel distances, fleet fuel economy (partly a result of faster fleet turnover), parking demand (and the associated infrastructure), and alternative mode use. Analytical results suggest that current carsharing candidates reduce their average individual transportation energy use and GHG emissions by approximately 51% upon joining a carsharing organization. Collectively, these individual-level effects translate to roughly a 5% savings in all household transport-related energy use and GHG emissions in the U.S. These energy and emissions savings can be mostly attributed to mode shifts and avoided travel, followed by savings in parking infrastructure demands and fuel consumption. If indirect rebound effects are taken into account (where individuals’ travel-cost savings is then spent on other goods and services), these savings may fall to as little as 3% across all U.S. households.
Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment, Transportation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c3960461304a80f75c5493fe7e9875e3f978d825
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In Automotive Engineering
In Transportation
Citations in the corpus
- Does car sharing reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Assessing the modal shift and lifetime shift rebound effects from a life cycle perspective (2020, background): “Several studies have suggested faster wear and tear and replacement of shared versus privately owned vehicles (Chen and Kockelman, 2016; Meijkamp, 1998).”
- Analyzing the Effects of Car Sharing Services on the Reduction of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions (2018, background): “Chen and Kockelman [15] examined the lifecycle impacts of car sharing adoption on energy use and GHG emissions in the U.”