Sharp increase in the number of car-sharers in Belgium
2022 saw the number of car-sharers in Belgium increase by 40%. By the end of last year 121,394 people in Belgium were sharing a car, either with friends or neighbours or as a subscriber to a car-sharing service such as Cambio or Miles. Never before were there so many Belgians sharing cars.
The figures come from Autodelen.net an online platform that promotes car-sharing. The organisation’s annual report that was published on Tuesday states that on average each car-share vehicle results in between 3 and 10 fewer cars being on our roads. This in turn reduces the need for parking spaces, leaving more room for additional greenery such as trees or grass.
At the end of 2022 there were a total of 121,394 car-sharers in Flanders. More than half of these lived in the Flemish Region, 41% of Belgium’s car-sharers live in the Brussels-Capital Region, while just 3% live in Wallonia.
The so-called free-floating car-share services saw a particularly big increase in their popularity during the past year. These services allow those that use them to leave a vehicle in a different place to where they got it from. Some of these services use a network of fixed locations where the car can be picked up or left where others simply stipulate that it must be left anywhere within a certain area. During last year the number of subscribers to free floating car-share systems increased by 78%.
Meanwhile, the number of shared cars owned also increased sharply during 2022. There are currently 5,316 cars that are shared in Belgium. Last year the number of shared cars increased by 671. Much of the increase can be accounted for by an increase in the number of free-floating shared cars caused by the arrival of the German company Miles and the expansion Poppy’s free-floating fleet.
Autodelen.net and Leuven University (KUL) have calculated that each car that is shared results in between 3 and 10 fewer cars on our roads.