Flexible Rural Carsharing with Container-based Fleet Logistics

1. Long distances should not be covered by carsharing vehicles in order to reduce demand of vehicles, battery capacity and recharging time.
2. Despite the optimized redistribution of vehicles it would be inefficient to use carsharing for commuter flows that are bundled and clearly unbalanced concerning time and direction: Either there is still a high effort for vehicle redistribution or many vehicles are again used just twice per day.
3. Despite the fact that some light electric vehicles can be used with an moped licence (category "AM" in some EU countries) there are still parts of the population that have mobility needs but are not allowed or not able to drive such a vehicle.

In order to achieve optimal rural and suburban mobility at reasonable costs for the public we need an optimized division of labour between the publicly accessible components means of transport:

• Conventional, scheduled public transport is divided into two fields:
  • A network of backbone services, consisting out of railway lines suitable for passenger transportation and bus routes with high demand. These services operate from the early morning to the late evening with trains or buses every hour or half hour in both directions. These lines follow the principle of a network-integrated regular interval timetable (hub-node-structure with optimized interchanging times).
  • In Peak hours, not only the frequency of trains or buses on these backbone routes is increased but there are also additional routes operated only during peak hours, connecting smaller villages to the scheduled public transport network.

• In this way scheduled public transport relieves the carsharing system from a big part of the journeys in peak direction: in the morning from the periphery to the center, in the afternoon from the center to the periphery. At the same time the flexible carsharing option solves the unpopularity of typical communter buses caused by the fact that commuters have no possibility to get home if they want to stay longer in the city than usually. With the flexible carsharing (without the requirement to bring the vehicle back to the place where it has been taken) commuters can regularly use scheduled trains and buses, but if they return later from work they can use a shared light electric vehicle. The carsharing system offers comprehensive mobility over the whole territory and should be used mainly for those diverse journeys that do not lead in the morning into the cities and in the afternoon back, but tangentially between rural and suburban locations or in opposite direction to the commuter peaks. Beside unusual commuter routes (e.g. people working in a more peripheral location than they live in or working during the night) this includes the mostly underestimated mobility needs for leisure activities, business appointments, shopping, administration, medical care or care for children and elderly relatives.

• Locations away from the backbone routes of public transport are made accessible for people without driving licence by demand-responsive public transport (paratransit). This service also covers the whole territory, but compared to the carsharing system it is less flexible as users have to book a ride via phone, web or app and have to accept some waiting time.

• The effort for the redistribution of carsharing vehicles can be further reduced by discounts for users contributing to a more even vehicle distribution e.g. by choosing a departure station with more vehicles and/or an arrival station with fewer vehicles (if different stations are close to the actual origin resp. destination of the user) or by using two vehicles instead of one vehicle if two persones ride together from a (nearly) full to a (nearly) empty station. Incentives should also be provided for the use of public transport instead of carsharing if this leads to a more even distribution of the carsharing vehicles over the rental stations.