We are delighted to announce our partnership with Zipcar.
Zipcar is the UK’s biggest and most popular car-sharing club. Members get access to their 3,000 cars and vans as and when they need them – just search, book and unlock all via their app. It’s city living made simpler, smarter and greener.
Here’s why Zipcar is involved in The Camden Clean Air Initiative, why we’re proud to have them support us, and a little more about them.
Why do you support The Camden Clean Air Initiative?
The Camden Clean Air project has a clear mission to improve Camden’s air quality. We wanted to work with Camden Clean Air because of their ability to bring together a whole range of stakeholders, businesses, and residents to improve air quality in Camden. Cleaner air for all is a key priority for Camden and London as it has a vital role to play in improving the health of Londoners. Car sharing can help deliver this priority. We are on a mission to enable simple and responsible urban living, and have a vision to deliver zero-emission driving and be fully electric by 2025 across all our vehicles in Camden and London.
We already have over 300 fully electric vehicles in our Flex fleet, which have been driven by almost 80,000 members already. We hope that by working with Camden Clean Air and their partners we can bring our Flex service and therefore our electric vehicles to Camden, to operate alongside our existing Round trip service.
What are your plans for being involved?
We’re looking forward to meeting Camden businesses and residents to understand more about their travel needs and how we can work together to improve air quality in Camden.
What do you love most about Camden?
We love Camden, its diversity, culture, arts scene, and market. It’s one of the best places to live and work in London, if not the UK, and is renowned for its energy and buzz. Zipcar has a vibrant membership in Camden who love using our vehicles as an alternative to private car ownership. We want to encourage even more people living in Camden to get rid of their private cars, make more sustainable transport choices and help improve Camden’s air.
A little more about Zipcar
Zipcar is the UK’s biggest and most popular car-sharing club. Its members get access to 3,000 low and zero-emission ULEZ compliant cars and vans as and when they need them – just search, book and unlock all via the Zipcar app. It’s city living made simpler, smarter and greener.
Zipcar offers members an easy, sustainable transport option – the alternative to owning a car. Zipcar makes getting in and around London an easy, affordable and sustainable option alongside walking, cycling and public transport use.
Zipcar has a mission to enable simple and responsible living – which means they want to help communities and councils to build sustainable transport options. That’s why they have a vision to be fully electric by 2025.
Car sharing with Zipcar is proven to be a sustainable transport choice; independent research has shown that including Zipcar in a neighbourhood reduces car-ownership and dependence on the car significantly. In fact, according to CoMo research, every Zipcar replaces 23 personally owned cars off the road – meaning more space and cleaner air for everybody!
There are two ways to use Zipcar: Roundtrip cars and vans – where you pick up and drop off a vehicle from it’s own, dedicated bay. Or you can take a one-way Flex car (like a self-drive taxi) that you pick up and drop off from streets near where you live or work (although please note this is currently not approved by Camden council, but is available in 15 other boroughs and at Heathrow Terminal 5). Our Flex service also has most of our electric vehicles, which is why we are keen to work with Camden to bring this service to your borough.
Camden Clean Air Bespoke Activation
This set out to gain a better understanding of how to enable the shift away from privately owned cars in Camden and if there was a need for an increase in car sharing services. We wanted to understand how we could achieve behaviour change so we ran a survey and community workshop to listen to the voices of those living and working in Camden.
The survey also identified that over 70% of non-car owners still require a vehicle at certain points in time such as moving heavy items including shopping, or transporting children, elderly, and for those times when there is no public transport These present a significant challenge to overcome if we are going to reduce vehicle use in Camden. We also explored how these journeys could be made as green as possible and analysed the role that car sharing could play. The research found that 42% of residents said that if they had access to a shared one-way rental electric car, this would encourage them to get rid of their private car.
You can read all about this via the following link.