Italian city dwellers eager to share, study shows

Italy’s total fleet of 5,030 shared vehicles have been booked nearly 4.3 million times and driven 30 million kilometres in the past six months,  indicating a growth of 35 percent. Such is the conclusion of a study by shared mobility platform – or car sharing aggregator -  Urbi, which analysed data gathered from Car2go, Enjoy, Share’n go, DriveNow and ZigZag in Rome, Milan, Turin and Florence.

The study was presented at the Smart Mobility in Smart Cities conference at the university of Milan. Each of the four cities shows a strong, progressive growth in car sharing, with Turin (+54 percent)  and Milan (+41 percent) clearly setting the tone. Interestingly, the total number of shared vehicles in Turin decreased by 8 percent, indicating that the ones left are used more intensively.  

Nearly half of Italy’s shared car fleet can be found in Milan, where 2,386 vehicles are booked 12,750 times per day. Most of the trips take place on Fridays and Saturdays, between 6 and 8 PM. The average booking lasts 25 minutes and every car is used 2.7 hours per day. That is a lot more than in Florence, where vehicles are rented for just 1.3 hours per day.

Looking into the user details, three out of four car sharers are men, and one in three drivers is aged between 24 and 35. The higher the age group, the lower their share in the user group – over-65-year-olds represent just 7 percent of the Italian car-sharing community.

Picture copyright: Urbi, 2017