On the occasion of Darwin Day, we retrace the history of an innovation that changed road mobility in Italy and around the world.
Darwin Day, International Darwin Day, has been celebrated for almost 20 years now science as a tool for the betterment of humanity. A day to remember, the11 February, as the anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the biologist who formulated the theory of the evolution of the species. And who better than him, then, can inspire people all over the world to always innovate and renew themselves?
Il car sharing represents the demonstration of how science and innovative ideas, applied to the problems of everyday life, have managed to produce aevolution in mobility on a road that can bring significant improvements to the individual and the community.
Car sharing: a constantly growing phenomenon
Today car sharing is a commercial mobility service, provided by companies, which allows users to book and use a rental car for short periods of time, even for a few minutes, paying only for its actual use.
The system has now taken hold in all large European and Italian cities and is also spreading to small towns. Yet, car sharing was not born as we know it today and, in fact, it has had different experiences stages of development in the years. Let's see, then, what were the main turning points of this innovative mobility service.
Sharing a vehicle: more than 70 years of trying
It was the 1948, in the post-war period, and the first documented car sharing organization appeared on European roads. The first service outline of this primordial form of shared timeshare was created by a housing cooperative in Zurich made up of private individuals, driven by ecological ideals.
These first attempts at vehicle sharing later found greater diffusion in the early 70s throughout Europe: in France, for a couple of years, a coin-operated car system was tested, while in 1974, in Amsterdam, one can already see a physiognomy more similar to the modern one, with small electric vehicles and electronic controls for reservations and drop-off. Suffolk, England, also had its own car sharing service in 1977 which allowed interested parties to share car rides.
The experiments continued for all 80s and 90s, in Europe and, to a lesser extent, in the United States and Canada, with a slow but progressive growth of ideas and proposals. In that period, the offer was characterized by many small organisations, all however characterized by a common element: the absence of profit-making purposes.
Le motivations, still valid, which pushed private individuals or companies to organize themselves in vehicle sharing, in fact, there were mainly two.
- Ecological: sharing vehicles effectively combated traffic congestion and environmental impacts, to the benefit of a better quality of life, especially in highly urbanized areas.
- Economic: sharing made it possible to reduce the costs of purchasing and maintaining the cars, burdening the budget of many individuals to a lesser extent than traditional car ownership.
The commercial growth of car sharing: the first attempt in Italy
An important turning point in the ways in which car sharing was created and proposed occurred in early 2000s, when the need to increase the efficiency of services led to shifting the attention of the phenomenon to the commercial level, with the consequent development of more structured organizations, capable of offering professional paid car sharing services.
These were soon supported by the more forward-thinking local and state governments, who understood the advantages from an environmental point of view, in terms of easing traffic congestion in urban centres, reducing polluting emissions and more rational use of private cars in favor of alternative modes of travel.
He was born in 1998 the first decree allocating funds for the development of car sharing in Italy, approved by the Ministry of the Environment and Land Protection. While only in the 2001 there is the first real practical attempt at car sharing Italian Milan, not surprisingly proposed by the environmentalists of Legambiente. The city of Milan today leads Italy in the use of shared mobility services on a wide range of means of transport.
Internet and smartphones: the car sharing boom in Italy
If these first experiences in Europe and Italy have had the merit of introducing the concept of shared cars as an alternative mobility tool for everyone, it is only with the greater availability of services internet, smartphones and applications digital that car sharing has had its definitive consecration, with widespread appreciation from the public. There digitalization of the car sharing service in fact, it allows the user to independently manage the registration phase for the service and the rental and return phases, through a convenient app.
Electric car sharing: the evolution of the species is complete
But what makes car sharing truly effective? First, his being a complementary solution to public transport, which can integrate perfectly with it, especially in the city, creating continuity of movement, an alternative to the exclusive use of the private car.
Precisely the fact that car sharing presents itself as an ideal intermediate solution between public transport and private cars has allowed the phenomenon to modify old models of use of the road, ultimately transforming the use of cars. from product to service and favoring one more rational, economical and sustainable mobility.
And it is precisely by virtue of this last objective, the ecological one, which has distinguished car sharing since its inception, that the "evolutionary" scale of car sharing closes today, finding its full fulfillment in latest generation electric vehicles which allow polluting emissions into the air to be reduced to a minimum.
Electric car sharing E-VAI: the next step of evolution
Among the car sharing service managers who have entered the new alternative mobility market is E-VAI, which starts precisely from this last phase of development of the sector, the electricity one, to act as a forerunner towards the next evolutionary stage: the creation of shared, sustainable and integrated mobility throughout Lombardy.
The car sharing of E-VAI, in fact, differs, not only by being the only one with a totally electric fleet, but also for the capillarity of the service, reaching the point of covering, with its own stations, not only the large provincial capitals, but also the smallest urban centers in Lombardy, guaranteeing users the possibility of moving throughout the region in a continuous, flexible and green way.
In short, if Darwin had gone by car, he would certainly have chosen an electric car sharing E-VAI.
