By 2019, car sharing had become an important element of the urban transportation mobility ecosystem that enabled households to reduce their vehicle ownership levels. Car sharing companies had been well established in major cities for years, even decades, and by the late 2010s, car sharing had expanded to the suburbs. The COVID-19 pandemic brought an abrupt end to this expansion, and car sharing companies shrunk their sphere of operations, with several going out of business completely.
This study draws on three surveys of the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) carried out in 2018, 2021 and 2023, representing near peak pre-pandemic, pandemic and post-pandemic conditions for car-sharing. Car-sharing fared quite differently in different parts of the region, with almost no drop in car share membership in Hamilton between 2018 and 2021, a modest decline in Toronto and a significant decrease in Peel and York. In addition to car-sharing, the surveys asked about teleworking and auto ownership, and we have estimated a joint model of car-sharing, telework and auto ownership, both a pooled model and one for each survey year, in order to tease out the different role car-sharing membership (and telework) played in reducing car ownership in each period.
