Designing a car-sharing service for small cities

Car sharing service is becoming popular in the large cities, with an high population density, since it seems to address the limits of both the private car and the public transport by offering the flexibility of the former combined with the reduced need of parking spaces of the latter. While in large cities the car sharing becomes a new element of a range of alternatives, and it appears especially suitable to public transport users who seldom use the private car, it appears interesting to investigate whether such service could be attractive or not even in smaller cities, where public transport is less frequent and parking might not be an issue. In this paper the elements to be evaluated when planning car sharing for small cities are presented and discussed, while an approach for designing it is introduced. First, the different ways of organizing and managing a car sharing service are presented, focusing on the use of electric vehicles and on the integration with the other modes, such as public transport and bike sharing. Moreover, the possibility of integration with the fleets of public administration is evaluated. The elements to design the service, i.e. the number of vehicles, the number of parking areas and infrastructure, pricing policies, are estimated considering the cities of Gorizia and Nova Gorica.