Reducing Waste Through Car Sharing

One of the byproducts of integrated systems is the more efficient use of resources and assets.  My current favorite example of this is my Nest thermostat.  It keeps track of every time my furnace goes on and off and presents the data to me in a way that inspires me to use less energy.  Yes it is only an incremental improvement in my resource utilization, but every little bit helps.

The dramatic improvements come in areas where assets can be more heavily utilized.  Ride sharing services like Lyft and car sharing services like ZipCar have the potential to change the numbers by orders of magnitude.  There are cars out there that don't get driven for days or even weeks at at time, and my car gets only a few hours use per day.

There are 193 million licensed drivers in the US driving an average of 13,500 miles per year in 250 million cars.  At an average of 30 miles per hour that is a utilization rate of 3.9% of the time.  With this math it sure seems like it would be possible to double the utilization rate.  Twice the utilization means we need half the cars.

Driving half the cars twice the amount of time does not reduce fuel consumption or emissions or the utilization of the road system you say.  That is absolutely correct, but it would cut all emissions from the production of cars in half (and painfully the jobs would be cut in half too) as well as things like parking places and auto crushing facilities.

Better utilization would also enable us to collectively invest more in each car -- hopefully that would increase the average fuel consumption, and improve safety.  The ultimate that I hope to see in my lifetime is the self driving car.  With such an invention the average utilization could go up a whole bunch more.​

On the theme of picking winners and losers, I am going with the ride sharing and car sharing companies, and not the car makers and car crushers.  ​