Car Sharing and Peak Spreading Studies in Sheffield: Final Report.

This Study of two firms in Sheffield city centre has been carried out under a contract with LTR2 Division of the Department of Transport, dated 28th March 1980. The Department of Transport has been interested for some time in various aspects of car-sharing, and the impact on car sharing of different work hour arrangements, and had previously carried out surveys of car-sharers in Government offices at Longbenton, Newcastle upon Tyne (TAU 1977) and Llanishen, Cardiff (TAU 1979) where flexible working hours were in operation. This study was designed as a continuation of those studies, in a city centre area where car parking was severely restricted. The prime objective was to measure levels of car sharing in locations with higher levels of public transport provision but more restricted parking, for later comparison with the results from Longbeutzen and Llanishen. The need for the study was occasioned by the desire to know more about the factors which influence people to share cars, and the characteristics of existing spontaneously formed car-sharing arrangements and participants. To obtain this information, details of the travel and work habits of the workforce concerned had to be collected and analysed. It was considered useful to try to establish any characteristics common to ad-hoc car-sharing participants as a basis for suggesting possible causal factors. The form of the study, in terms of the type of data collected, and its subsequent tabulation, was largely shaped by the need to provide data comparable to that collected in the aforementioned studies at Longbenton and Llanishen. Other work in the Institute on the prediction of demand for car- sharing (Bonsall, 1980) and the establishment of experimental carsharing schemes (Bonsall et al, 1980) provided a useful basis for comparing the survey requirements for identifying potential car-sharers with those for identifying existing ones.