In their requests for appropriations under the supplementary budget for this fiscal year (April 2008 to March 2009), the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism and the Ministry of the Environment have included funding for the introduction of a system of subsidies to be provided to local governments and other organizations that are promoting the use of car sharing. There is a possibility that this will serve as a major impetus for the spread of this arrangement.
The first car-sharing system is said to have begun among students in Switzerland. Strict restraints on bringing cars into central urban areas prompted the launch of an arrangement under which multiple owners shared a single automobile. Now it is said that this system is in use in 600 cities in 18 countries around the world, and it is estimated that some 350,000 vehicles are being shared.
The spread of this system represents a response to the demands of both individual consumers and society. For consumers, car sharing can offer considerable savings by comparison with individual ownership. Members of car-sharing groups do not have to pay for the purchase of their own vehicle or for maintenance, fuel, or parking; instead they pay a basic membership fee and a time-based charge for their actual use of the groups' cars. The savings can be especially great for those who previously owned cars but ordinarily used them only for a relatively small number of hours.
For society as a whole, meanwhile, car sharing offers a number of benefits: Since it makes drivers think in terms of the cost of use measured in units of time, it tends to reduce the total number of hours of vehicle use, thereby alleviating traffic congestion and emissions of carbon dioxide. Also, sharing reduces the total number of vehicles present within the area in question, meaning that less space is required for parking—and thus that more space is available for other uses.
Recently we have been seeing moves by auto leasing companies to enter the field of car sharing, along with an increasing number of cases in which car-sharing systems are introduced at the condominium level. But there are some legal and regulatory hurdles standing in the way of the system's spread: Car-sharing groups need to secure licenses as car rental businesses; also, they must cope with the provisions of the Garage Law requiring car owners to have exclusive parking spaces. Meanwhile, a number of improvements in the car-sharing systems will probably be necessary in order to convince potential users that they will benefit from joining car-sharing groups. For one thing, the number of locations where users can borrow cars will need to be increased greatly. Also, the variety of cars available probably needs to be increased. In addition, the charges paid by users may need to be brought down.
In the future it is expected that car-sharing arrangements will be set up in an increasing number of cases where new condominium complexes are developed. But in order to make these systems financially viable, the condominiums will need to contain high numbers of residential units. So for the near term it seems likely that the growth in use of car sharing will continue to be gradual. Meanwhile, it will be important for the numbers of car-sharing success stories to increase steadily in response to the introduction of government support measures and for those involved on the front lines to deal with the specific issues they face. Car sharing is still a small-scale business in Japan, but if it reaches a certain size, its spread may well accelerate dramatically.
(Eiki Tagami)
