Car sharing in the Ruhr area: great need, but hardly any offers!

Car sharing in the Ruhr area: great need, but hardly any offers!

In North Rhine-Westphalia, there is a growing interest in car sharing, but there is still a need to catch up in the Ruhr area. According to the Federal Association of Carsharing (BCS), which published a comprehensive ranking in November, Düsseldorf and Cologne are the only cities in NRW that are represented in the top 20 of Germany's car sharing cities.

car sharing enables several people to use a car without having to own it. The comparatively small offer in the Ruhr area is particularly remarkable, where two years ago the great provider of Greenwheels left the market. Other providers such as Cambio and Stadtmobil gradually fill the gap, but the number of car sharing vehicles per 1,000 inhabitants remains low in the Ruhr area. Dortmund takes it to only 0.06 vehicles per 1,000 inhabitants, which corresponds to 36 cars. In comparison, cities such as Karlsruhe over 5, Munich and Hamburg have more than 3 as well as Cologne and Düsseldorf over 2 vehicles per 1,000 inhabitants.

comparison of car sharing offers in NRW

The distribution of car sharing vehicles in North Rhine-Westphalia is as follows:

• Cologne: 2,325 cars
• Düsseldorf: 1,472 cars
• Münster, Aachen, Bonn: Around 1 vehicle each per 1,000 inhabitants
• Essen: 220 vehicles (largest offer in the Ruhr area)
• Duisburg: Follow
• Wuppertal: 226 vehicles
• Gelsenkirchen: No offer in ranking

The increasing costs for owning your own car, including insurance and repairs, promote demand for car sharing. Nehrke, an expert in this area, calls two essential factors for improved car sharing care: the presence of a long-standing provider and the provision of car sharing parking spaces by the community, as is the case in Bonn and Essen, for example.

In addition, an investigation shows that there are more free floating vehicles as station-based vehicle stations in cities such as Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Stuttgart and Frankfurt am Main. In other cities, such as Karlsruhe, the station -based car sharing dominates. It is noteworthy that Potsdam is an exception, since a free floating provider from Berlin has expanded its business area, which leads to an outnumber of free floating vehicles. More and more cities are offering combined systems that include both station-based and free floating car sharing, with Heidelberg, Augsburg, Leipzig, Frankfurt am Main, Darmstadt, Bremen and Hanover belong to the top 20 cities with such systems.

For more information about Carsharing in Germany, visit carsharing.de Read what n-tv on this topic.