Making Car Sharing and Car Clubs Work - Case ... - The Civil Service

MAKING CAR SHARING AND CAR CLUBS WORKCASE STUDY SUMMARIESOperating Structure9.6 The Commuter Centre is in the PRP offices, whose location is good in relation to NorthActon tube, but is not central within Park Royal itself.9.7 The car share scheme, known as Park Royal LiftShare on their website(www.parkroyaltravel.org.uk), is run on Intrinsica software purchased a couple of years agousing TfL and SRB6 funding. The Commuter Centre has not installed the latest Intrinsicaupgrade, as it costs about £3,500 per annum for updates and assistance. In particular, KPfeels being signed up for support would have been useful for training the stream oftemporary staff at the Commuter Centre since August 2003.9.8 The time taken to put someone on to the Intrinsica system is estimated to be about an hour.Even with the current low level of operation, the car share scheme needs at least an hour aday of someone’s time. However, a car share user can go on the Internet and change theirown details on the Intrinsica system.9.9 The key bright spot this year has been the involvement of McVities (UK), the biscuitmanufacturer (see below, in section on car share users).Impact and Effectiveness9.10 Due to the lack of travel planning resources, the car share service is not being marketed atpresent. KP is concerned to avoid doing it half-heartedly and wants to give car sharers adecent service.9.11 About 300 people are registered. This had reached 400, but KP has recently done a cull.About 100 car share members are from McVities (UK) (see below). About 50 car pools havebeen set up, but it is not known how many actual matches have been created and are inuse.9.12 It is not known how effective the car sharing scheme has been in reducing car use at ParkRoyal. It is especially difficult to gather data as there are so many different separate firmsand organisations in the area.9.13 The proposed Transport Management Association is hoped to have two full-time staff andwould therefore be expected to make a much bigger impact.Successes / Failures9.14 There are several difficulties being experienced at present, but the key one is the absence ofanyone able to devote any proper time to marketing and organising the car share matchingservice. Bearing in mind the size of the potential catchment population (40,000), the relativeeffort going into car sharing at present is very small indeed.9.15 However, there are other issues too, that would have to be tackled whether or not carsharing had more resources:Final V1.1, Dec. 2004 - 59 -