Zipcar’s demise means people such as me are back in the slow lane – and stuck needing their own costly car | Phineas Harper

Zipcar, the world’s largest car sharing club, is leaving the UK. The company, which operates around 3,000 shared vehicles in Britain, announced plans to close its UK operations at the end of the month. The news comes as a blow to the hundreds of thousands of Britons who regularly rely on carpooling, and is a major setback in efforts to reduce emissions and congestion.

I am particularly drained. This year I finally learned how to drive, including becoming a Zipcar member for the rare occasions when I need a vehicle. As newly qualified drivers aren’t allowed to rent Zipcars until they’ve held a license for a year, I bought a used VW Beetle to tide me over, counting the days until I could flog it and sign up for Zipcar instead. Now, with the service shut down, I’m worried about having to maintain an expensive piece of steel that I need for less than 1% of the year.

The growth in private car ownership is a problem. Domestic transport remains the largest source of emissions in the UK. The expansion of car clubs such as Zipcar could have helped, as research suggests that each shared vehicle replaces about 20 private cars.

Yet Britain was already lagging behind its neighbors when it came to car clubs. According to Invers, a car-sharing technology company, Germany has more than six times as many shared cars per capita as Britain. Zipcar’s departure will reduce the total number of shared cars in the UK to just one for every 30,000 people. – effectively eliminate carpooling for large swaths of the population.

The impending collapse of car sharing in the UK is expected to be a serious embarrassment for the government, which is elsewhere trying to curb the automobile’s dominance. The revised National Planning Policy Framework, for example, has an entire section dedicated to the development of sustainable transport, including car sharing, and requires local authorities to “promote sustainable travel patterns that limit future car use”. But what is the point of defining noble policies for tomorrow without supporting businesses and services that can enable better choices today?

In last week’s Budget, Rachel Reeves flooded the passenger car sector with funding, increasing grants for new electric cars to £1.95 billion and topping up grants for new electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure to £500 million.

Reeves’ EV gift comes as she forked out £1.5 billion to secure a loan to Jaguar Land Rover after a recent cyber attack and froze fuel taxes for another year. How does the Chancellor find billions to support the private car sector, but offer nothing to support the (much more profitable) car clubs and their 328,539 users?

Arthur Kay, a Transport for London board member and author of the new book Roadkill: Unveiling the True Cost of Our Toxic Relationship with Cars, fears that the Treasury has been seduced by the claims of electric car makers and is funneling money into questionable electric vehicle deployments that could otherwise support effective programs supporting reduced and shared car use schemes. “The electric vehicle lobby has captured the state so effectively,” he tells me, but he cautions that “changing fuel sources doesn’t change all the other negative aspects of cars.”

The truth is that electric cars are not a panacea. They are quieter and emit fewer direct emissions than their gasoline counterparts, but still produce brake, tire and other particles that account for much of driving-related air pollution. Manufacturing electric vehicles is also carbon-intensive and requires grid energy to operate most of the time; some electric cars only reduce driving-related carbon emissions by 47%.

Shockingly, increasing private electric car ownership could also fuel greater car use. In Norway, 94% of new cars sold are now electric thanks to astronomical public subsidies. However, a little-publicized study has revealed a hidden dark side of the Scandinavian electric vehicle revolution. In September, researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology found that greater electric vehicle ownership leads to an overall increase in car travel of 10 to 20 percent. Just as building new roads increases traffic by encouraging more people to drive, flooding Norway with brand new private electric vehicles has enticed more Norwegians to get behind the wheel.

Electric vehicles, while a marked improvement over their gasoline-powered predecessors, replicate many of the same problems of automobile-based urban planning, forcing us to maintain expensive machines that sit idle 95 percent of the time. Zipcar’s loss is not a business failure; it’s a warning that our leaders’ transportation priorities are out of balance. Ultimately, if we want a country built for people rather than parked cars, we need to get serious about sharing.