Environmental impacts of car-sharing: life-cycle assessment

This is a MSc thesis defended at the Department of Computer ScienceEven though the promises of the environmental benefits of car-sharing could seem somehow intuitive, existing studies of such are not only scarce but either not complete or even inaccurate in some instances. Most significantly, the majority of the studies mistreat the ‘modal shift’ effect (not accounting for the changes in the actual distances travelled by various modes) or neglect the possibility of a change in a vehicle’s lifetime mileage caused by its sharing (Martin & Shaheen, 2016; Nijland & van Meerkerk, 2017). Analysing such flaws as well as drawing on the previous research on behavioural effects of car-sharing participation, a comprehensive model for mobility-related yearly carbon emissions had been proposed. The model accounts for the distances travelled by other modes as well as for various scenarios for vehicle’s mileage. In addition to that, a life-cycle assessment (LCA) approach has been applied allowing for the actual shared mobility related emissions to be estimated. This includes manufacturing, infrastructure, fuels, and use related components of the transportation system. As a result, for several cases of car-sharing platforms in Europe and North America, a significantly lower reduction of the yearly emissions has been estimated, around 11% on average, in contrast to the previous LCA studies in the field which reported 50% reduction on average (Chen & Kockelman,2016)