Our changing relationship with cars

Driving can make you feel empowered, in control, and independent. Research shows that reasons for private car ownership include the privacy, the comfort and of course the convenience. I am a car owner, and obviously like many others out there we couldn’t imagine living without them. For our weekly chores, for visiting the relatives, that day trip to the beach or getting across town for your best friend’s birthday dinner. Having a car is great isn’t it? But in today’s age where we are offered many competitive alternative transport options (Uber, electric bikes, car- and bike-sharing platforms, segways…) and sophisticated journey planning apps, we have never been more capable or empowered to move seamlessly through our urban environments. How does this change the value of the private car?

Private car ownership and car dependency are associated with a range of negative health outcomes.

A recent study of Sydney 119 commuters found that about 21% had car journeys to work that could easily be replaced by an alternative mode that would take about the same as their current journey.

For many, private car ownership is a necessary part of life, but there are many for whom car ownership is far more costly than is actually realised. Addressing private car ownership, traffic congestion, pollution, and the overall sustainability of transport systems in various cities around the world is obviously a highly complex issue. So here I focus just on car use and highlight the invisible costs of traditional private car use. I suggest that there is already a shift towards carsharing and that it is likely to increase in the future within the context of our urban transport options. I think the future does not involve abandoning the car, but using it within a transport system of differentiated and linked modes of travel. As the true costs of private car ownership (for both the individual and collective) are realised there is a growing case for carsharing as a more significant part of our future transport mix, thus either detracting from or reshaping the traditional use of the oil-fuelled car.

“I hate this traffic.”

“You are ‘this traffic’.”

If you find that you still need a car from time to time, shifting to carsharing could save you money, improve your physical health and mental well-being, and greatly reduce your carbon footprint. There are a lot of hidden costs and inconveniences of owning a car and because these costs are detached from our actual day-to-day experience of driving. Thus, the daily cost of commuting in monetary terms, but also in terms of our health, society and the global environment, become virtually impossible to see.

But first, taking a quick step back, in terms of societal health, private car use en masse has seen cities sprawling over decades of development. “Car dependency” is the diagnosis urban scholars have given the world’s cities, associated with high oil consumption and dependency, lower population densities, large investments in roads and highways instead of public transport infrastructure, demolished green belts, and the list goes on. The prioritisation of the car is literally the driving force that has shaped and continues to shape the sprawling development of many cities. Las Angeles recently agreed to delay their hosting of the Olympic games (giving the 2024 games to Paris) in part because of their horrendous car dependency problem and severely underinvested public transport infrastructure. Yes reducing emissions from transport is critical to addressing climate change, but electric vehicles (EVs) are to cars what e-cigarettes are to smokers: still potentially harmful although there is probably less debate about the harmful effects of car dependency. As much as I do enjoy watching Top Gear and dreaming about driving a Ferrari through ribbons of road in the Swiss Alps, I do get a little frustrated when discussions focus on the car itself and ignore the mobility-lifestyle system in which the car is used.

In addition, there are many negative externalities of private car ownership that we don’t realise (in terms of the lifestyle they promote) and car-dominated urban areas (in terms of air and noise pollution). Private car ownership and car dependency are associated with a range of negative health outcomes. An eight year study in China showed a shift to private car use led to roughly a 200 percent increased risk of obesity. The concoction of carcinogens flowing from exhaust pipes (nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, ozone and other particles) can affect both our respiratory and cardiovascular systems. Living a private car lifestyle can add to the busyness that contributes to stresses of modern life, which has been linked to rising mental illnesses such as anxiety and depression. Traffic noise can induce nervousness, deprive people of sleep, while the experience of being stuck in traffic can raise blood pressure and frustration resulting in negative health effects.

In this particular story in a quiet leafy suburb in Melbourne, Ms Smart owns a small-medium sized car with a market value of $10,000 AUD, which has already been driven 50,000 kms. She doesn’t use her car to commute to work every day but will sometimes use it to visit clients or go to meetings, perhaps once or twice a week on average. She also uses the car to go to yoga and do her shopping, but admits she could probably take the tram or walk. Ms Smart is a ‘semi-frequent’ car user. Driving around 10,000 kms/year with a fuel efficiency of 10L/100 kms, her annual operation costs (insurance + registration + fuel + wear & tear + servicing) are approximately ($800* + $750 + $1,300 + $660 + $200*) $3,710 (you could think of it as about $80 a week or $11 a day). The figures are estimates based on quotes and information I got from the internet, and I assumed an average fixed price of unleaded petrol at $1.30. I didn’t include the depreciation value in this calculation.

*obviously these costs vary depending on your own situation, but these are researched conservative estimates

In addition to the running costs, there are so many other facets of owning and using a car regularly that are rarely considered as a ‘cost’. Sitting in peak hour traffic, doing laps of the parking area to find a carpark at the congested shopping centre, parking tickets, parking fines, speeding fines, and those extra little favours you do for friends and family – it all adds up.

In contrast, I’m sure Henry Ford would have envisioned cars would liberate us, that they would allow us to travel further and make connections between previously unconnected geographical spaces. But arguably cars are doing much of the opposite, fostering a dispersion of communities and justifying outward development where our connectivity has become dependent on rather than strictly enhanced by the car. It is also true that, following Jevon’s Paradox effect, although cars become more efficient we just drive them further, negating benefit from the efficiency design. Therefore, we need to look less at the cars and more at the way we integrate car use into our lifestyles and into the web of other types of mobility that allow us to get to work, the supermarket and that dentist appointment.

So what does it cost Ms Smart to do the same amount of travelling on a carsharing scheme? In a carsharing scheme like GoGet (where there is a fleet of vehicles which are rented out by members) the cost structure is quite different to private ownership. You don’t have to explicitly pay registration, insurance or petrol (in certain circumstances) because they are in part covered by your membership and rental rates. What is different however is the costs are distributed among other users of the platform, as well as collectively across the fleet of vehicles. The carsharing company is able to negotiate discounted insurance rates because of the size of the fleet; individual car owners do not have the same bargaining power. It is actually difficult to put a number on the yearly cost of forgoing car ownership and switching to a sharing scheme, because if Ms Smart sold her car it is likely that she would replace her travel needs with a range of different alternative transport options (walking, cycling, public transport, lifts from friends/colleagues, or even reducing trips to one big bulk grocery shop per week rather than a few). Adjustment will likely include a shift to different transport modes (new travel practices) as well as an adjustment to her lifestyle activities (altering shopping patterns or asking friends to meet her at a cafe near the train station).

what type of cars we will be driving seems to be fairly predictable. How we will be using them is far less certain and far more interesting.

Still not sure if carsharing would suit you? Let me put it to you this way Ms Smart: If I said that I would give you $9,500 cash (the market value of the car minus stamp duty, transaction costs, roadworthy certificates etc.), PLUS $80 every week forever to switch from owning your car to using a mix of other transport options centred around carsharing, I wonder what you would say then. At the end of the year Ms Smart would have pocketed that $3,710 of running costs that we calculated earlier, some or most of which could be spent on public transport, carsharing, or bike maintenance perhaps. There’s a good chance that Ms Smart’s lifestyle would be more active and she would be physically and mentally healthier too. But what if all of the other people who share a similar mobility niche to Ms Smart (a similar kind of lifestyle that could afford to forgo a private car) all switched to more active transport modes that resulted in less negative externalities on society and more positive benefits for themselves? First: it is already happening in many cities around the world, the last five years there has been an explosion of carsharing, ridesharing, and bikesharing models all over the world (many funded by city governments). Second: many users are switching, trying, testing, and mixing their mobility lifestyle – how many of you have started using Uber or similar platform within the last few years? Third: if it is accessible, effective, efficient, affordable, enjoyable and better for your health, it’s hard to see why people who are in a position to switch will not at some point down the line.

Unfortunately the switch is easier for some than it is for others. Short of moving house or changing job locations, cars are still necessary for millions of people, especially in sprawled cities. Families, people with a disability or people who simply need to move bulky items regularly (I’m in that category) all rely on car ownership. Back-of-the-envelope calculations for drivers who rely on their car daily or very regularly, switching to a carsharing platform is unlikely to be cheaper. It is too expensive to rent out a car every day – it’s more economical to have your own. Therefore carsharing is a niche for people with a certain lifestyle surrounded by accessible transport alternatives, and not for everyone. However, a recent study of Sydney 119 commuters found that about 21% of them had car journeys to work that could easily be replaced by an alternative mode that would take about the same as their current journey. There is clearly a latent population of people who could potentially adjust their travel practices, we can all probably think of examples where we should have walked but got lazy and jumped in the car simply because it was there.

I think many people are yet to discover the benefits of carsharing as a new means of transportation, with the possibility of car owners also supplementing their mobility mix with carsharing. In cities with widely accessible, regular and well-integrated transport options the relative value of the private car decreases, and vice versa for cities or towns that are devoid of any other kind of transport options. Spatial inequality exists between cities as it does within them, and so individuals and families are not equally positioned to the luxury of being able to surrender their cars for alternatives. However, the privilege of ‘car free’ is becoming more widely available, especially to urbanites. Today, traditional transport means are supplemented with: carsharing, bike-sharing, ride-sharing, and psuedo taxi services like Uber. On top of this you throw more highly connected transport networks combined with a high penetration of smartphones and journey planner apps and suddenly modern mobility in many of our cities is looking more and more efficient. As overall mobility rises in our great cities car ownership will likely decline, but car use may still increase if our use of the car changes.

In the end though, the elimination of cars from our mobility mix seems even less realistic given the recent surge of electric cars. We are at a global tipping point of electric vehicles. Al Gore has been arguing this tipping point narrative for some time, and I’m sure it comes through strongly in his latest film. Volvo has announced they will be manufacturing only electric by 2019. The UK became the fifth country in the world to commit to only electric cars by 2040, and not to mention Elon Musk’s new Tesla 3 model. One thing which is still being explored is whether as we shift away from car ownership, how does the car as a status symbol change? Our relationship with the object – the car – will likely change, and thus have its own ramifications. In the age of peak oil, climate change, urban air pollution, gridlock and congestion, stress, anxiety and depression associated with busy lifestyles, what type of cars we will be driving seems to be fairly predictable. How we will be using them is far less certain and far more interesting.

Tim

 

Kent, J L, 2014. Carsharing as active transport: What are the potential health benefits? Journal of Transport & Health, 1, 54-62.

Kent, J L, 2015. Still Feeling the Car: The Role of Comfort in Sustaining Private Car Use, Mobilities, 10 (5), 726-747.

Newman, Peter W.G.; Kenworthy, Jeffrey R. (1989). Cities and automobile dependence : a sourcebook. Aldershot, Hants., England: Gower Technical. ISBN 9780566070402.

What did we expect from the sharing economy? A timely reminder about prosperity

This piece is a consolidation of thoughts and ideas from my Masters Thesis from 2016. Although I deliberately steered away from extensive referencing, my arguments here are based on a few hundred academic peer-reviewed articles, grey literature, news articles, discussions and countless hours pondering the subject.

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The sharing economy is a reminder of what we’ve always had. Its structures may be unprecedented, its scale unheard of, and its stories are new, but if you scratch away the overgrowth you’ll reach a bedrock of forgotten humanity. The sharing economy is a reminder of who we are, because it forces us to question what we want in this life. My question is why did we need to be reminded at all?

What did we lose?

What did we forget?

The first problem everyone writing on the sharing economy almost always admits is that it has no single definition, because of complexity, because people use it differently, and because there are varying levels of actual ‘sharing’ taking place. There may be infinite types of sharing economies, and different interpretations of how to use the term. Despite this we generally have some common understanding about what we refer to as ‘the sharing economy’. That’s not because we agree on what it looks like, but on how we dream of the sharing economy making our lives better.

We are more united in our expectation of what we imagine the sharing economy could provide for us, rather than what form it takes in real life.

Every day, usually after I’ve eaten breakfast, I sit down at my old MacBook Pro and type the words ‘sharing economy’ into Google, and then click ‘news’. Most of the news articles and blogs written on the sharing economy follow themes such as how the sharing economy should be (de)regulated, how the sharing economy is undermining workers’ rights, new statistics about how many people use the sharing economy and the latest innovations—like sharing your dog.

How are all these threads connected? Not by ’sharing’ per se because we find the concept of sharing difficult to define too. The term ‘sharing economy’ is widely applied to the likes of Uber and we have come to realise the contradictions with this example. The ‘sharing economy’ is not defined by ‘economy’ either because many argue that true sharing cannot happen when money is involved. What do the news articles on the sharing economy have in common? The centripetal force is a desire for freedom, to be liberated from the oppression of individualism and greed, the very symptoms of the dream that consumer society was sold—particularly post-world war II in Western countries—when they were supposedly shown the way to happiness by corporations.

We do not take lessons about how to be happy in school. It’s something we’re either left to figure out ourselves or something we simply don’t think about. In the absence of this reflection on our own lives, we become more vulnerable to manipulation of our desires by others who create mirages of security for us.

Writers like Harvard University professor David Putnam have reinvigorated the idea of individualism, which differs slightly from greed. Corporations would sell individualism as ‘freedom’ and ‘independence’, while I see it more as inconsiderate selfishness (which is often subconscious)—a kind of 21st century mantra that each of us is entitled to purchase anything we want, if we can afford it. Individualism is a dangerous attitude towards consumption and ownership that has been deeply embedded in the bulk of affluent societies. Using markets, capitalism thrives off of individualism because this message (reiterated by trillions of dollars worth of advertising and marketing every year) tells us that our priority is ourselves over others, but in an even more sinister way tells us that we can buy our happiness and own everything we can ever need. The automotive industry alone invested over $40 billion in 2016. Of course I am making huge generalisations here, but it is clear that such generalisations are close to the truth in many ways: corporations now sell us more dreams than products or services that serve a specific function.

Why is there ladybug?!

Greed, related to individualism, and a form of self-interest, can be thought of as the desire to accumulate more than is needed, often at the expense of others. Greed is often associated with hoarding wealth for no practical reason other than for the sake of it. Greed is situated in a landscape of zero-sum gain, where accumulation by one individual deprives benefits to others. Here I think of Smaug, from Tolkein’s The Hobbit, the treasure hoarding dragon, who represents all of the miserliness of humankind, as well as how greed can breed obsession and violence. The Businessman from Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince has a sole purpose in the universe to count the stars, and recount them, so that he may own them, so that he may accumulate even more stars. Saint-Exupéry makes a clown of the Businessman and corporations that they are a part of, highlighting the pointlessness of it all.

The Businessman

However, greed and individualism have a master, they can be tamed. They bow to rituals of sharing, an act through which individuals can recognise their existence within a society, a group of people who also have needs, just like you and me, and with whom we are connected. Katriel (1987) summarises this point well:

“Greediness, as one form of self-interest, is both dramatized and socially ‘tamed’ in ritualised sharing; the self is momentarily subordinated to impersonal social forms of conduct … an act of symbolic sacrifice in which one’s self-interest and primordial greed are controlled and subordinated to an idea of sociality shaped by particular cultural values, such as equality and generalised reciprocity.” (Katriel 1987: 318) ⁽¹⁾

In other words, Katriel demonstrates that the act of sharing is a counter-force to greed and individualism. The power of sharing here is not so much the physical distribution of a falafel (in Katriel’s example), but the symbolic power of controlled self-sacrifice over ‘primordial greed’, which is subordinated to ‘an idea of sociality’ imbued with values of equality and reciprocity. The repetition of these sharing rituals are not just evidence of cultural norms and values, but they actively reinforce and transform them.

We do not take lessons about how to be happy in school.

The values of societies are tied directly to the kinds of practices that people undertake in everyday life. Drawing on what is called ‘social practice theory’, practices, once established, are then valued by those that practice them. Normalised acts of sharing, or ‘sharing practices’, thus may lead to a broader recognition of social and environmental awareness (if people value them more highly)—an awareness that breaks the bubble of individualism and counters the consequences of greed. When such practices have a strong path dependency in a society, they may create an in-built defence against conflicting values, including greed and individualism.

Can the sharing economy create new social practices that counter or slowdown the momentum of greed and individualism? Perhaps not all kinds of ‘sharing economies’ have the potential to do this in their present forms. However, profit-based sharing economy businesses may be unwittingly creating a shell for their future, more socially-beneficial successors. The emergence of not-for-profit ridesharing in Austin, Texas in the wake of Uber and Lyft’s departure is perhaps an early example of a grassroots sharing economies trying to inhabit the empty shell of a former corporate structure.

There is no shortage of sharing economy criticism, with articles like ‘The “Sharing Economy” Masks Reality’, or ‘The Sharing Economy is a Lie’. What did the sharing economy promise us, and then take away to make us so mad? What lofty expectations did we have? How were we deceived? A lot of current discontent about the sharing economy comes down to reality not matching expectations. Again, my question becomes relevant: what did we expect from the sharing economy, and why?

An answer to this question is relatively simple: we want to stop the rising tide of individualism and strengthen our communities again, and get rid of the horrible effects of greed, in which vast inequality between the rich and poor is seldom realised by the rich, although it is experienced daily by the poor. We want to have a sense of belonging, and we want to be valued in our communities. We want to be happy yes, but we also want to be sad sometimes, and so Tim Jackson’s conception of prosperity is perhaps the most accurate word I can think of that describes what we should be striving for. The World Happiness Report (2017) clearly shows that the happiest countries in the world score highly on variables such as ‘having someone to count on in times of trouble’, ‘generosity’, ‘freedom’ and ‘trust’. We know that our social relationships are one of the key to creating a deeper sense of fulfilment (following basic needs—thanks Maslow), and we know that money can contribute to our well-being up to a certain point, but can have negative effects beyond that threshold.

The Emperor’s New Balance by Andrew Roberts

And in seeking more meaningful relationships, we turn to society—a group of other people with whom we can relate. As far as I know, we never lived as individuals, we’ve always lived in relation to others— not always happily, or peacefully—but human beings are social creatures by nature—‘no man [sic] is an island’ English poet John Donne once wrote. What separates us from the rest of the organisms on the evolutionary tree is not our intellect, but our language, culture, our shared symbolic meanings and interpretations of the world which bind us together. One aspect is our ability to cooperate with each other, creating a ’hive-like’ macro-organism (a society) in which emergent properties allow us to rise above nature’s intended boundary of fight to survive. We are now larger and more complex than a small family, more than a flock of birds, and more than a colony of termites: we have built giant cities, complex concrete jungle-cave systems in which we fester and thrive simultaneously. We live together, but we often forget that insanely obvious fact.

We grew into ‘civilians’, constructed order, and then somewhere along the way got blinded by the growth imperative (growth has an important function but when it is not checked against a humane goal, well, you know, it can suck). Some have argued that this super-organism of humanity has become so large that we have lost control and we don’t know how to govern it. Somewhere, fairly early on in humanity’s development, we forgot about our own prosperity. We lost meaning, and became complacent with short-term goals to make money to make more money, just like Saint-Exupéry’s Businessman. We burrowed deep into loneliness and individualism and lost sight of what it is that we truly desire: what we need. In some ways we are devolving, not because we are going backwards in technology or collective intelligence or monetary wealth, or the size of our great cities, but because we make little room for wisdom. Mindfulness and reflection are key tools which generate wisdom, a powerful tool that can help us to identify what we truly need, and what we have forgotten.

It is thus the ‘sharing turn’ that has us confused, up in arms, excited and joyful all at the same time. And yes, the fact is, the contemporary sharing economy was born into a capitalistic world. There’s only so much that an infant can do when it is born, what nature can do against nurture, at least in the beginning. Not all of the Businessmen are exercising this mindfulness yet, but in a finite world governed by natural systems, the laws of thermodynamics cannot provide for infinite human desires driven by greed and individualism—the costs of this path are not just scary but physically impossible. E. F. Schumacher reminded us of this asymmetry in Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered. Unfortunately, as we journey past the planetary boundaries like mythological creatures in our own kind of messed-up Odyssey, we realise they are in fact not myths at all: a terrifying realisation.

In this sense, the wisdom about how to live our lives to the fullest, without destroying our ecosystems and without creating highly unequal societies which entrench poverty, has been around for a long time, and maybe it never actually left. We cannot just hope for a great communications strategy to spread wisdom, it’s something that requires individual reflection, but individuals need to be liberated, to be given space, time and support to undertake this reflection. The good news is, there may be a catalyst. The sharing economy—although a composite of many different activities—does make space for acts of true humanity, generosity, reciprocity and consideration of others. Acts of kindness are very real, and proliferating. Embodied in community gardens, local exchange and trade systems (LETS), swap meets, skills swaps, tool libraries and so many other local examples, there is hope for many counter-movements yet; movements that reject individualism and greed.

I am hoping that the true power of what we today call ‘the sharing economy’ is nestled in the fact that, through its imperfect expansion, it is encouraging more and more people to try new types of sharing, which in turn may enable them to break the cycle of growth and accumulation and reflect on their lives to question what makes them and others around them meaningfully prosper. Maybe bake a cake and bring it to the office or share it with your school mates, or when it’s raining at the bus stop offer to share your umbrella with the person next to you. The fact that we even need a term like ‘the sharing economy’ should be alarming to us—that our current economies are severely lacking in the humanity that we obviously desire (and desperately need for nature’s sake and our own). This knowledge has always been with us, but it’s something that has been forgotten, buried under piles of sparkly designer shoes and our own vanity. The sharing economy, in its role as a timely reminder, has not received the recognition it deserves for its ability to remind us of our own humanity.

If you’re wondering what practical steps you can take, start by reading this practical guide of how to live more simply.

“Sunset only brings the colours out, but they were always there.” – Oh Belle, the Barr Brothers

(1) Katriel, T. 1987. ‘Bexibùdim!’: Ritualised sharing among Israeli children. Language in Society, 16, 305-320.

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The Car Next Door Model: Go on Holiday… and Make Money?

I decided to sign up to Car Next Door, a company which helps you share your car with your neighbours, in order to make use of my car while I was out of the country. Now I’ve made it part of my everyday life. In the first month, I earned about $260 by doing virtually nothing (big thanks to my housemate for keeping an eye on things while I was away too, thanks Stas!).

Thanks also to Car Next Door for providing me with some additional environmental statistics and information for this blog and for my thesis. They told me that their aim is to bring about a “mass de-car-ing of our suburbs“, and this is such an interesting idea. How could this vision be realised, and what are its implications?

Drawing by Andrew Roberts, 2016

 

There’s you, and there’s me. We both need a holiday. You can’t wait any longer, you just need to book something. You decide to fly to Tasmania for a weekend holiday (MONA is offering half-price tickets let’s say) so you decide to drive. It’s convenient. Over that same weekend, I decide to fly from Sydney to Melbourne for my friend’s wedding.
What if driving to the airport became cheap… or, wait for it, even profitable? Here’s the concept. You park your car at the airport after snaking around a few levels of the carpark, and fly to Tasmania to taste floral wines and bathe your tastebuds in brie. Meanwhile, your car, which would usually sit idle raking up parking fees, could be rented to me for the days that I’m in town. You do not have to pay for parking anymore because I’m using it, and on top of that, you’re receiving rental payments including all the costs of petrol, wear and tear and insurance. For me, it’s convenient too.

The sharing economy in itself does not immediately address our insatiable desire to consume. In fact it makes it easier in many cases.

It’s always been a dilemma. I feel the pain every time I know someone is squeezed to spend $70 on a taxi or hours bunked up on buses shuttling inefficiently into the CBD and then out again, dragging their suitcases along cobblestones through Melbourne rain.

Here’s the basic maths, and just bear with me: driving your car 40 minutes to and from the airport might cost you $20 in petrol and running costs (for argument’s sake). Parking for two nights and three days at the Terminal is on average about $80. So that’s about $100  for driving your car to and from the airport and parking it there for two nights.

I touch down at Melbourne Airport a couple of hours after you’ve left to Tasmania and I am willing to pay anything cheaper than all of those car rental companies, especially if I don’t have to wait in line. So I decide to hire your car for the two nights and three days while I’m here and return it to the airport before you return from your holiday. Let’s say I pay you around $150 for the three days, which seems reasonable. On top of that of course I have my usual petrol costs, but $50 a day for a car rental is a pretty darn good deal.

Result: subtract $80 in parking fees, and receive an additional $150 cash, that’s a net position of $230 because you decided to go on a holiday to Tasmania and drink wine and bathe your tongue in brie. In other words, driving to the airport to go on holiday could more than cover your return flight to Hobart. You decide to buy another bottle because you’re that pleased with yourself. From my perspective, I’ve just saved myself some money, saved time lining up behind other car renters and a bunch of paperwork too. It’s faster and cheaper for me, and profitable for you.

The model I’m presenting here is simply that from Car Next Door (Australia) and Whipcar (UK). Car Next Door currently has over 18,000 members in Sydney and Melbourne and is looking to expand its business to airports, probably for the reasons I’ve just mentioned. These kinds of schemes sound great on the surface, and I’m all in favour for them. But environmentally, are they better? This is complexity that I’m going to try and flesh out in my thesis. Peer-to-peer car sharing can incentivise owners to use their cars less (to rent it out more often), and also allow others to live a life without car ownership. P2P car-sharing adds to the mix and important ingredient to the multi-mode transport network available to us. The access versus ownership lifestyle is very real. Car Next Door also offers drivers with a carbon-offset option, something which is unique to this program. A representative of Car Next Door told me that their aim is to bring about a “mass de-car-ing of our suburbs”, and this is such an interesting idea. Where does or should the equilibrium lie? Can we find the perfect balance between car ownership and car accessibility?

On the other hand, if travel costs and ease of mobility becomes easier inter-state, this creates an incentive for me to want to go on holidays more often. Combine that with the availability of Airbnbs and suddenly holidaying has become cheaper and easier. One less car on the road, but three more flights each year.

It’s never that simple, but I hope with the example I’ve provided you can see the main dimensions of how the sharing economy can function in theory, and how problematic it can be once you scale back to the broader systems and longer-term incentive structures that it creates. The sharing economy in itself does not immediately address our insatiable desire to consume. In fact it makes it easier in many cases. But it does raise interesting logics about the efficiency of what and how we consume and in an economically viable way. Maybe models like these won’t make a dent in our global carbon emissions, however that story is still yet to play out. In my opinion this model gives us a right to be hopeful, but only if we’re critically minded.

 

~T

Who Shares? Addressing Climate Change and Loneliness, Together

 

In seven years Uber has mushroomed to be a multinational mother of ‘sharing’ businesses whose net worth hovers around USD $63 billion. While in comparison, Airbnb in less than 10 years has hit USD $20 billion and has essentially done what Hilton Hotels took a century to achieve. Even further, neither company is tied down with the costs of owning capital that it leverages. How is this possible, and what in the world is going on?

Well, it means I can get to the next house party without a ridiculously expensive taxi fare. But in terms of the development of human civilisation (1), the fast rise of companies like Uber and Airbnb point to a new gap in global human lifestyles, which these companies have opportunistically exploited (whether true sharing is actually involved will be discussed another time).

What this means is the way humans are naturally arranging themselves on earth is providing us with new opportunities (2). No dictator is orchestrating the global migration to urban areas and cities: it’s part of a natural transition, and even when compared to ants, termites or bees, there are no other forms of life that come close to a ‘city system’ anywhere in nature. You could say humans were destined to be city-dwellers since evolution began.

For the entire year I’ve committed to learning and writing about the benefits of the ‘sharing economy’ through my Masters thesis, trying to figure out if there are environmental and social benefits to be gained from ‘sharing’. In keeping with this theme, I’ve decided to make my intellectual journey transparent. I am driven by a deep concern about global social and environmental justice issues, especially climate change. I’m super intrigued about what cities have to offer us in terms of solutions to these challenges.

Tokyo, Japan – Photo by Jacqueline Nguyen

You could say humans were destined to be city-dwellers since evolution began.

Increasing isolation, loneliness and detachment from community are sad side-effects of many urban societies, especially in the developed world. Seoul, which has the highest suicide rate of OECD countries, is turning to a sharing city model to address this among other social and environmental issues (4). Cities can create a human reality where real person-to-person connectedness is not only possible but almost inevitable.

How could we harness the power of cities and the trillions of interactions between people who live in them? No one really knows the answer, but to me this represents an under-studied and significant opportunity for positive change, especially with a steady stream of over 2.5 billion more people joining the urban revolution by 2050 (5).

I’m really excited to share my findings about ‘sharing in cities’ with you all as the year goes on.

~T

Tim is a Master of Environment Student at the University of Melbourne, ex-Scientific Communicator, part-time geographer, philosopher, tutor and musician.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PS: I’m looking for internship opportunities in Europe (hoping for Amsterdam, Copenhagen…) for 2017 – if you know of any organisations that a sharing economy enthusiast such as myself might be interested in, please let me know!

 

(1) see Demographic Transition Model <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition&gt;

(2) Jeff Brugmann, Welcome to the Urban Revolution; Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers, What’s Mine is Yours; Paul Mason, Postcapitalism, Diane Ackerman, The Human Age; Johnson,

(3) See the theory of ’emergence’ in systems thinking <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence&gt;;

Steven Johnson, Emergence: the connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software
<http://www.arch.utah.edu/cgi-bin/wordpress-cmp/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Johnson%20-%20Emergence.pdf&gt;

(4) Sharing City Seoul: A Model for the World <http://www.shareable.net/blog/sharing-city-seoul-a-model-for-the-world&gt;

(5) UN World Urbanization Prospects report <http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/Publications/Files/WUP2014-Highlights.pdf&gt;