L`auto formule verte

Merging into the mainstream
MONTRÉAL, LE LUNDI 9 JUILLET 2001
By Elisabeth Rosenthal
TUESDAY, JULY 5, 2005
giants of the rental car industry, like Hertz and
Shell, are dabbling in commercial car-sharing.
There are about 300,000 people involved in
car-sharing worldwide, with the majority in
Europe, according to Susan Shaheen, a
researcher at the University of California at
Berkeley. Mobility, the largest single company,
with locations all over Switzerland, has 60,000
members and 2,400 cars. In the United States,
in total, there are just over 1,000 shared cars.
The logic is simple: Owning a car is both
expensive and impractical in many cities, and
parking is highly limited. In Amsterdam, city
center parking permits take six years to obtain.
But what happens when a child misses a
school bus? Or you need to transport bulky
purchases? Or you want to drive a guest to the
airport?
Greenwheels provides an alternative. For
members, who pay as little as ?5, or $6, a
month in base fees, driving away in a shared car
is almost as quick as getting in to your own
private vehicle.
After massive expansion in the last two years,
Greenwheels cars are parked all over central
Amsterdam, often only a few hundred meters
apart.
Members locate the nearest available car on
the Internet and reserve it, automatically
sending a wireless signal to the car's onboard
computer to recognize the client's personalized
key and pin code.
They return the car to its specifically reserved
parking place (leased by Greenwheels from the
city), and are billed on a monthly basis, based
on tallies of kilometers and hours driven by the
on-board computer.
"We were haunted by the idea that you could
use technology to make this idea into a large
scale, professional operation that would be very
convenient for customers - and we know it
would have a good effect on the environment,"
said Jan Borghuis, co-founder of 10-year-old
Greenwheels, dressed in the de-facto company
uniform of shorts, sandals and a T-shirt, in the
company's ramshackle Rotterdam office
surrounded by bicycle tires rather than auto
parts.
Starting with three old leased cars and an
automated telephone answering tree (all
departments led to Borghuis), Greenwheels
spent its first six years losing money, said his
partner, Gijs van Lookeren Campagne, slowly
accumulating a critical mass of members and
cars, and evolving their recipe for car-sharing.
For "competitive reasons," the two will not
say how many members or cars are now in the
network (the key to the recipe), although there
are more than 300 pick-up locations in
Amsterdam and 80 in Rotterdam – numbers that
are increasing weekly.
Within the last year, they have bought a
competing company in Amsterdam as well as
the largest German car-sharing plan, StattAuto,
which was renamed Greenwheels as of this
month.
On a recent evening, Renée Lion, 31, and two
colleagues were heading out of Rotterdam in a
Greenwheels car that "lives" two blocks from
his home, to a company outing in the
countryside. "It's so simple, I don't think we
could have gone without this," he said.
The actual environmental impact is less
straightforward, although researchers say carsharing certainly relieves traffic congestion and
pollution to some degree by reducing car
ownership.
Studies suggest that one shared car replaces
between 4 and 10 private cars, Shaheen said.
The result is a 30 percent to 45 percent
reduction in vehicle miles traveled for each
customer.
"On the whole this is very good for the
environment," said Rens Meijkamp, a Dutch
researcher, who found that nearly 50 percent of
Greenwheels clients used the service as a
replacement for either a first or second private
car. After joining, families reduced their effect
on the environment by 40 percent, he said.
But the industry is still trying to define itself not yet mature in Europe and "still in its
adolescence" in the United States, Brook said.
In some places companies are developing
partnerships with state railroads or
supermarkets. In others, cities have given
shared-cars the right to drive in bus lanes.
"I don't know exactly what is the potential of
car-sharing or if it can be defined, but I think the
demand will develop as far as the supply will
become more attractive, simple and closer to
each inhabitant," said J.B. Schmider at the
Brussels Conference, manager of the fledgling
French AutoPartage Network, which to date has
only 2,500 members nationwide.
Making it work - and work financially - has
required a new type of science, and
Greenwheels guards its formula like the recipe
for Coke.
Car rental companies want all their cars
rented all the time. But car-sharing companies
in Europe tend to view themselves more like
savings banks whose currency is mobility: By
having a large number of members, and an
excess capacity of cars in the right places, they
can accommodate an unusual event - taking out
a car. Greenwheels' goal is to provide customers
with a nearby car within five minutes.
Last month there was a rare public
transportation strike in Holland. "It was our
moment of truth," said Borghuis, since most
Greenwheels customers take trains to work.
"In most places there were cars available
when people needed them. That made us
happy. We passed the test."
This article, along with others,
is available for on-line reading at
www.communauto.com
L’auto formule verte
Jean-François Gamache, La Presse
«Si j’avais un char...», entonnait une
chanson célébrant le culte de
l’automobile. Benoît Robert, président
de Communauto, un service d’autopartage, n’y songe pas du tout. Il rêve
plutôt au jour où 500 000 Québécois
arpenteront les routes de la province
au volant d’une des 25 000 voitures
arborant le logo de la société.
L
e service d’auto-partage offert par
Communauto permet à ses membres de
louer une automobile, pour une heure,
un jour ou une semaine, et de se débarrasser
des tracas liés à la possession d’un véhicule.
Terminée, l’interminable chasse aux
stationnements dans les rues de la métropole.
Révolues, les visites au garage. «Si on ne veut
pas avoir de voiture en ville, c’est la formule
idéale», clame Francine Labelle, une des 2000
membres de Communauto.
Implanté à Montréal et à Québec, ce
service d’auto-partage est le plus important en
Amérique du Nord et croît de 50%
annuellement. Il compte 12 employés, possède
130 voitures et a eu un chiffre d’affaires d’un
million l’an dernier. En Europe, la pratique
s’est introduite plus rapidement dans les
mœurs populaires. On recense ainsi plus de
40 000 utilisateurs en Suisse et 25 000 en
Allemagne.Très jeune, Benoît Robert a adopté
le vélo et le transport en commun. Les services
de location traditionnels ne lui convenant pas,
il a imaginé un service répondant à ses
besoins. En 1994, à l’âge de 30 ans, il lance à
Québec la coopérative Auto-Com, un
regroupement d’un quinzaine d’usagers se
partageant trois automobiles. Un an plus tard,
Auto-Com compte déjà plus de cent usagers.
De retour à Montréal après son séjour dans la
Vieille Capitale, M. Robert démarre sa propre
entreprise, Communauto, abandonnant du
même coup le concept coopératif. «Les gens
achetaient le service mais ne voulaient pas
s’impliquer dans l’organisation», relate-t-il.
L’Agence métropolitaine de transport
appuie le concept de Communauto, soulignant
que le service d’auto-partage est
«complémentaire au transport en commun».
Ce service «vise à intégrer l’automobile dans
les systèmes de transport public», ajoute le
président de Communauto. Une étude
allemande indique que les utilisateurs d’un
service d’auto-partage réduisent leur
kilométrage annuel effectué en automobile de
58%, tout en parcourant plus de 1500
kilomètres supplémentaires via le transport
public. Québec a reconnu les mérites de cette
pratique pour l’environnement en promettant
son appui au partage de voitures dans son
Plan d’action 2000-2002 sur les changements
climatiques.
Une enquête menée par Communauto en
1998 révèle que 61% de ses membres ont
renoncé à la possession d’une automobile.
Appliquant ce résultat au nombre d’abonnés
de la société, on peut évaluer à plus de 1000
voitures la réduction nette du parc automobile
québécois, qui en compte tout de même plus
de 2 500 000. L’impact environnemental
demeure donc relativement limité pour
l’instant mais la croissance spectaculaire du
service pourrait modifier la situation.
Alors que des services similaires en Europe
ont choisi d’utiliser des voitures électriques
afin de réduire les émissions polluantes,
Communauto n’envisage pas cette option. «On
ne peut se permettre d’expérimenter avec des
nouvelles technologies. S’attaquer à deux
révolutions en même temps est la meilleure
façon de se planter», selon le président de
Communauto.
Loin d’être composée de relents de
l’époque hippie, la clientèle de Communauto
est largement diversifiée. L’utilisateur type a
entre 30 et 50 ans, un revenu de 30 000$ et
possède une formation universitaire.
Après quelques mauvaises expériences, la
société demande désormais à ses adhérents de
fournir leurs dossiers d’assurance et de
conduite. Ceux-ci doivent également se
soumettre à une analyse de crédit. De plus, un
dépôt initial de 500$, remboursable après un
an, est exigé des membres. Ainsi, «les gens
doivent y penser à deux fois avant de
s’inscrire», d’expliquer M. Robert.
Après leur adhésion, les membres n’ont
qu’à réserver l’automobile par téléphone et se
présenter au stationnement désigné, où les
clefs sont gardées dans un petit coffre-fort. À la
fin du mois, l’utilisateur reçoit à domicile une
facture détaillant ses déplacements. En
moyenne, les abonnés de Communauto
déboursent 70$ par mois.
M. Robert ne cache pas les inconvénients
de l’auto-partage. «Il faut prévoir les heures de
départ et d’arrivée», souligne-t-il. Les membres
de Communauto s’en accommodent fort bien,
«moins de 1% des trajets étant perturbés». À
Photo Robert Nadon, La Presse
AMSTERDAM When Mariane Polfliet discovered
that she had an emergency meeting in a hardto-reach suburb of Amsterdam last week, there
was no need to panic: Within minutes, she used
a computer-coded electronic car key to drive
away in one of the hundreds of shared cars that
are now scattered around the canals of the city
center.
There was something incongruous about the
package: Polfliet - dressed for a Mercedes in an
elegant tan suit with a lawyerly leather briefcase
- driving the small, bright red Peugeot 206 with
the neon-green wheels and tornado screaming
"Greenwheels" stenciled on the door.
But for thousands of people in the
Netherlands - and hundreds of thousands
worldwide - car-sharing groups like
Greenwheels have filled the gap between
private car ownership and public transportation.
For cities where it has taken hold, the concept is
helping to ease traffic congestion and reduce
pollution, studies have found.
"Some lawyers don't want to visit clients in a
car like this, but I don't care, because this idea
has changed my life," said Polfliet, who uses
Greenwheels instead of owning a private car.
Although car-sharing has been a mythic
"green" concept for decades, it has become a
larger-scale reality only in the past few years and then only in a handful of places, like
Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands,
where it has been successfully reinvented and
commercialized by a small number of
companies relying heavily on computer
technology.
Overall, far more car-sharing projects have
failed than succeeded in the past 15 years, and
most are still too small to have a civic impact.
Still, as urban centers face ever more serious
traffic snarls and new technology makes carsharing simpler, dozens of cities in Europe,
North America and Asia - from Singapore to
Turin to Minneapolis - are re-exploring and
investing in the idea.
In January, representatives from a number of
cities met in Brussels at a conference organized
by a European Union initiative to promote carsharing.
"We see a big potential for European cities,"
the report concluded, estimating that at least
half a million private vehicles could be replaced
by car-sharing.
But the debate continues about whether carsharing is a boutique industry that works well in
certain slightly offbeat places, like Amsterdam,
or whether it can become an essential part of
urban transportation strategy, like buses and
taxis.
"I think it's going to be another 10 years
before it's going to have a really big impact
generally," said Dave Brook, an independent car
consultant in the United States.
"But we can say now that it's definitely a
viable niche, and its going to be a damn big
niche as well."
Private companies, including some of the
«L’auto-partage permet de concilier l’automobile
avec les règles de vie en milieu urbain», dit
Benoît Robert, fondateur de Communauto.
défaut de prévoir à l’avance leurs
déplacements, les usagers devront peut-être se
tourner vers des stationnements plus éloignés
de leur domicile ou, en cas extrême, se tourner
vers les services locatifs traditionnels. Afin de
pallier cette éventualité, une entente
permettant aux membres de Communauto de
profiter de tarifs préférentiels a été conclue
avec quelques services de location.
Stationnements en voie de disparition
Au cœur du Plateau Mont-Royal, où l’on
retrouve une forte concentration de membres,
Communauto est victime de son succès. «Cela
ne nous donne rien de faire de la publicité dans
ce secteur, nous n’avons pas d’espaces de stationnement disponibles», constate M. Robert.
«La Ville de Montréal cible l’auto-partage
comme une des mesures les plus prometteuses
pour réduire les émissions de gaz à effet de
serre», signale le président de Communauto,
mais la collaboration n’est pas aussi facile qu’il
le souhaiterait.
«On essaie d’encourager Communauto
parce qu’on y croît», affirme Noushig Eloyan,
vice-présidente du Comité exécutif de la Ville
de Montréal. La Ville a ainsi décidé d’arrêter la
vente d’un stationnement municipal afin de ne
pas nuire aux opérations de Communauto. Il
n’est cependant pas question d’accéder aux
demandes de Communauto et de «modifier la
réglementation» afin de permettre aux automobiles de la compagnie de stationner dans les
rues de la ville sans tenir compte des restrictions habituelles, de préciser Mme Eloyan. ■
D’autres articles de journaux sont disponibles
à la rubrique « Revue de presse » de
www.communauto.com
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