The Challenge

One of the main early targets of this site and the program behind it is to advance the "Carsharing-Plus" agenda in France, as an example of a non-traditional transportation communications and collaborative approach that can be well supported by the approach that is set out here. (When we say "Carsharing-Plus" here, the point we wish to stress is the potential that these projects have to complement and reinforce other transportation arrangements - public transport, rail, taxis, and non-motorized transport modes - thereby offering people for the first time potentially a real option to the long established preferred transportation option, that of owning and driving your own car whenever and wherever you can. Of course carsharing has potential as well in situations where first rate non-private car transportation options do not exist - such as in less densely settled areas - but the real potential, at least as far as their contribution to sustainable development is concerned, is in just those situations that are already reasonably well served by other non-car modes. In France, of course, this means mainly in larger and medium sized communities, of which there are many.)

Against this backdrop, it is our intention that this Web site and several others associated communications tools to provide an effective contact medium that can serve to bring together those most interested in these issues and projects in France, and help them interact more easily and effectively. Carsharing in France today is a substantially underdeveloped and underidentified transportation option. At present, while there are a slowly growing number of people and groups in the coutnry who are both knowledgeable about and interested in the basic ideas, they are neither sufficiently numerous nor well enough connected in order to provide the deep base of support that is required to new and better projects on line and supported as they must be in order to achieve their full potential. One proof of this is the fact that the actual development of carsharing projects lags considerably behind the European and OECD leaders. And in part this is a problem of critical mass.

This lag would not perhaps be such a consequent problem, were it not for the fact that there is a real need for new and more sustainable transportation concepts in France today -- and moreover that carsharing, got right, can be such a potentially powerful "turnkey concept" in helping push the overall urban transportation system toward greater sustainability. Furthermore, sufficient experience has been accumulated in leading edge developments in other places that we can now see quite clearly where such projects work best, and where their chances of success may be less great. What is interesting about this is that there are a considerable number of places in France that could lend themselves very nicely indeed to these approaches.

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The Tools

To this end, we start here with several useful building blocks. On the one hand, there is a slowly growing universe of groups and people in France who are becoming more familiar and knowledgeable about the entire field, together with a small but growing number of publications that can help in explaining the basic concepts and providing a French language database. The present project is making a serious effort at identifying both these groups and the various publications, and intends to provide identification and direct links as available. This is one way that we can contribute to the development of the critical mass that is needed to advance the carsharing agenda in a significant manner.

A second basic building block is the international CarShare Consortium site which has been built up over the last several years and which has brought together several hundred of the leading actors, researchers and scholars in the area - all of whom can be easily accessed by the parallel WWW program to this, via http://www.ecoplan.org/carshare/. This is an extremely rich resource for planners, researchers, government, policy makers, trasnportation providers, entrepreneurs and the media. And while most of this material is in English, German, Dutch or Swedish, the Consortium site provides a small translation utility that can help those who do not speak those languages to decipher at least their basic intent and content.

The third is this Transport Nouveau collaborative program and the several Web sites that have already been created to support it. Here are some of the specific ways in which we hope to make this useful:

The Calendar, which provides a handy means for announcing and keeping in view events and activities that may be of interest.
The Discussion Forum
The Membership Listing
The Library/Documenttation Center
The Polling facility
The translation utility

Each of these capabilities are explained elsewhere in these pages.