Car Sharing" Brings New Urban Form (Okurayama, Yokohama) - Intersection of Urban Life and Environmental Consciousness in 2006

Car Sharing" Brings New Urban Form (Okurayama, Yokohama) - Intersection of Urban Life and Environmental Consciousness in 2006

Looking back on the historical background of 2006, it was a time when the values of urban residents began to undergo a major shift. After the prolonged stagnation following the bursting of the bubble economy and the deflationary economy of the early 2000s, urban residents quietly became aware of the need to shift from ownership to use. The shift from an era in which owning a personal car was a status quo to one in which rationality and environmental awareness were emphasized, as if one could use a car only when needed was underway.

Car sharing has been the focus of attention in this trend. In particular, the initiative by C.E.V. Sharing, Inc. that began in the Okurayama district of Yokohama City, Kanagawa Prefecture, is an experimental and symbolic example of a system that meets the needs of urban lifestyles.

The car-sharing service, in which one car is shared by about five people for a monthly fee ranging from 1,980 yen to 3,980 yen, is equipped with an IC card lock system, can be rented in 15-minute increments, and can be reserved up to two weeks in advance. In addition to the initial and monthly fees, users did not have to pay for gasoline, insurance, and parking, all of which were extremely cost-effective compared to conventional car rental or car ownership.

Especially in urban areas, where monthly parking fees cost 40,000 to 50,000 yen in some areas, the system gained strong support, especially among younger people and dual-income households, who felt the weight of ownership. In addition, examples of car sharing vehicles as an added value for condominiums began to emerge, attracting attention as a new residential amenity.

This is largely due to the strengthening of environmental policies such as global warming countermeasures and resource conservation. With the Kyoto Protocol coming into effect (2005), there is now a strong demand in Japan for corporate and individual efforts to reduce CO₂ emissions. Car sharing was seen not only as a means of reducing costs, but also as part of an "environmentally conscious lifestyle.

Internationally, Mobility, a Swiss company, was known as a success story with 1,000 locations and 60,000 members. In Japan, the possibility of car sharing as an alternative means of welfare and public transportation was also being explored, such as in Nishinomiya City, Hyogo Prefecture, where wheelchair-accessible welfare vehicles were offered through the car sharing system.

In other words, the Yokohama-Okurayama car sharing project was an attempt to respond in a very modern and symbolic way to the multiple issues facing Japanese society in the mid-2000s: "redesigning urban life," "new ways of feeling ownership," and "environmental consciousness. These efforts were a precursor to the subscription economy and the sharing economy that would come later, and were the beginning of the "use it only when you want to use it" mentality that would become routine.