Car-sharing subscription preferences and the role of incentives: The case of Copenhagen, Munich, and Tel Aviv-Yafo

Car-sharing services provide short-term car access, contributing to sustainable urban mobility and generating positive societal and environmental impacts. Attraction and retention of members are essential for the profitability and survival of these services in cities. Yet, the relevance of a variety of possible business models’ features for car-sharing subscriptions is still under-explored. This study examines individuals’ preferences for subscribing to different car-sharing business models, focusing on the attractiveness of car-sharing-related features and incentives in different contexts. We designed a stated preference experiment and collected data from three different urban car-sharing settings: Copenhagen, Munich, and Tel Aviv-Yafo. A mixed logit model was estimated to uncover the determinants of each city's car-sharing plan subscription. The achieved insights pave the road for the actual design of car-sharing business models and attractive incentives by car-sharing companies in the studied or similar cities. Our findings reveal that although some car-sharing intrinsic features are likely to be relevant everywhere (e.g., pricing, parking conditions), the local context affects the preferences of others. In Munich, respondents prefer car-sharing services with fleets composed of electric vehicles and value high accessibility to shared cars, so marketing campaigns focusing on the positive environmental impacts of car-sharing and strategic distribution of shared cars (e.g., hubs) are expected to be very appealing there. As for Copenhagen, a high probability of finding a car, the opportunity to book a shared car in advance, and having plans including other modes are more appreciated, making hubs in high-demand areas and Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) plans very attractive. Finally, in Tel Aviv, our findings highlight the advantages of exploring different pricing schemes and offering dynamic incentives to users for fleet rebalancing to positively contribute to car-sharing subscriptions and ridership.