Puncturing automobility? Carsharing practices

• Carsharing is a more sustainable mode of mobility than the private car.
• Carsharing has emerged to challenge the hegemony of private car use in many cities.
• Carsharing supports practices traditionally associated with the private car.
• Its close relationship to private car practices supports carsharing’s endurance.
• Further empirical work is required on the way carsharing moderates private car use.

Contemporary scholarship and policy emphasise problems with car use. Though there is a strongly held view that the system of private car use may be impossible to shift, in this paper we consider one mode of car-based mobility – carsharing – through which subtle challenges to the dominant regime are made. Carsharing is an emerging transportation industry in which drivers access a fleet of shared vehicles for short-term use. This paper pursues a conceptual and investigative exploration of the emergence and endurance of carsharing as an alternative mode and offers a number of novel insights into ways the private car system might be challenged. Using a practice based framework of analysis, we focus not on the various structures or agents influential in carsharing’s relative success, but on the way carsharing endures as a routinely performed social practice. It reveals a wide range of mundane footholds for behavioural change, as well as demonstrates the profound complexity implied by any attempt to challenge, and change, deeply entrenched practices of day-to-day mobility.