Car sharing as an example of post-capitalist cultural change

This week we came across an excerpt from an essay written by Catherine Marie Simpson on car sharing – Cars, Climates and Subjectivity: Car Sharing and Resisting Hegemonic Automobile Culture? – exploring the concept of a group of people owning one vehicle and sharing the usage collectively.

We briefly touched on some of the digital technologies available for car sharing in last week’s blog post, Car Sharing – the old fashioned way (as well as some of the old methods for finding a car sharing partner).

The article explores the many benefits of reducing the number of vehicles on the road through the concept of sharing ownership of vehicles. Ms Simpson’s partner Bruce Jeffreys, together with Nic Lowe, founded Newtown Car Share in 2002, which is now called GoGet. There are other similar businesses operating in Australia.

We wonder whether her conclusions will appeal to all those car lovers out there:

“The prospect of climate change is provoking innovation at a whole range of levels, as well as providing a re-thinking of how we use taken-for-granted technologies. Sometime this century the one tonne, privately owned, petrol-driven car will become an artefact, much like Sydney trams did last century. At this point in time, car sharing can be regarded as an emerging transitional technology to a post-car society that provides a challenge to hegemonic automobile culture.”

We think that there are many out there who regret the demise of the trams in Sydney!

You can read an excerpt of the essay here, or the essay in full here.

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