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.