Each vehicle from the Cambio car-sharing company replaces about 13 private cars on Belgium's roads, according to a survey the company has conducted among its users. In Flanders, the ratio is higher, with each Cambio vehicle taking the place of 15 personal cars.
Cambio started using the first shared cars in Flanders in 2004, in Ghent. Cambio Vlaanderen is now present with 1,054 pooled cars in 62 cities and municipalities, for 30,825 users. The survey shows that four out of five Cambio users do not have a car in the family.
"Some 44% ditch their cars when they become members of Cambio and 29% may have bought a car if it had not "been for cambios as an alternative." Based on this data, Cambio Vlaanderen calculates that its shared cars take about 13,700 private cars off the street.
“That comes down to about 38 football fields of parking space cleared,” it said. “For Belgium we are talking about an area of 70 football fields.” Users also appear to travel by car less often than when they still had their own vehicles.
Cambio is just one of the car-sharing providers. Thirteen such providers were active in Flanders at the end of last year, Autodelen.net, a non-profit that aims to promote sustainable mobility through private carpooling, reported at the beginning of this year. Together they had more than 2,900 shared cars and over 122,000 registered users.
Meanwhile, the car-sharing company is also looking beyond cars. Cambio Brussels started renting cargo bicycles two months ago.
