Carsharing services in sustainable urban transport: An inclusive science map of the field

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2022.131981Get rights and content

Highlights

  • An inclusive science map of carsharing research (1980–2021) was provided.

  • Four main carsharing research themes were identified and discussed.

  • Carsharing potentially supports the circular economy transition in transportation.

  • Developing a sustainability assessment framework for carsharing is crucial.

  • The survival of carsharing services needs inclusive marketing and training plans.

Abstract

Vehicle sharing, electrification, and automation, as the triple revolutions in urban transportation, have been under debate towards a new transport paradigm. In this regard, carsharing services, as a potential solution for sustainable urban transport, have gained momentum within the context of sustainable cities in recent years. This research, as the first attempt in the literature, aims to render a comprehensive map of the body of knowledge in the carsharing field of research through conducting a systematic bibliometric analysis. To achieve that, a total of 729 peer-reviewed journal articles from the Web of Science database were scrutinized using keyword, text mining, and bibliographic coupling analyses. The analyses revealed four main research themes building the carsharing literature, including (1) collaborative consumption and carsharing business models development in the context of sustainable urban transport, (2) carsharing adoption with a special focus on user behavior, intention, and preferences, (3) carsharing operational challenges, considering infrastructure and fleet management, and (4) technological advancement towards deployment of shared autonomous vehicles and mobility as a service. The results showed that the carsharing literature lacks (i) a well-established and comprehensive long-term sustainability assessment framework, (ii) inclusive and integrative marketing and training plans, as well as effective incentives, (iii) a holistic analysis of the role of carsharing in the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals, (iv) reliable circular economy indicators designed to measure the circularity of carsharing to help transitioning towards a circular economy, and (v) a timely broad analysis on the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic and the future of carsharing post pandemic era, which call for more investigations in the future. The provided insights support both researchers and policy-makers by shedding light on carsharing services research by providing a state-of-the-art of carsharing studies and developments up to date, uncovering the emergent research themes and trends, and identifying research gaps for future studies towards better positioning carsharing services in sustainable cities development.

Introduction

In recent years, the concept of sharing economy has emerged as a new consumption style with the potential to support new production and effective use of products (Kurisu et al., 2021) through giving temporary access (i.e., without ownership transferring) enabled by using online platforms (Ranjbari et al., 2018). Due to the increasing population of urban areas, transport activities have become more critical than ever in developing sustainable cities action plans for local and regional governments and authorities (Martins et al., 2021). In this regard, carsharing services have gained momentum as a tool for transport policy-makers, since their improvements in the urban transport system can reduce the number of cars, leading to more sustainable cities (Ampudia-Renuncio et al., 2018). Carsharing, by providing the benefits of a private vehicle without owning it through sharing the vehicles by different drivers at different times, supports the transition of private mobility from ownership to service use (Shams Esfandabadi et al., 2020). Whether these services are provided through peer-to-peer (P2P) or business-to-consumer (B2C) platforms, carsharing consists of round-trip or one-way services in which vehicles are available for use without drivers. Therefore, carsharing differs from ride-hailing in that there is no driver to make a suitable trip for the service user, and differs from ride-sharing in that only the use of a vehicle is shared not a trip.

A substantial amount of scientific research on different aspects of carsharing has been conducted in the last decade. The major subject areas include but are not limited to business models (Münzel et al., 2019; Yun et al., 2020), sustainability aspects (Bocken et al., 2020; Hartl et al., 2018), operational challenges (Balac et al., 2019; Huang et al., 2018; Jian et al., 2016), adoption (Burghard and Dütschke, 2019; Chun et al., 2019; Ullah et al., 2019), demand (Li and Kamargianni, 2020; Zhang et al., 2019), technological advancements (Iacobucci et al., 2018; Vosooghi et al., 2020), and travel behavior (de Luca and Di Pace, 2015; Jain et al., 2020; Matowicki et al., 2021). Besides, few review articles have been published addressing different aspects of carsharing services, such as price and taxation levels (Schwieterman and Bieszczat, 2017), free-floating carsharing (Mattia et al., 2019), business models (Lagadic et al., 2019), vehicle relocation problem in one-way carsharing networks (Illgen and Höck, 2019), urban sustainability impacts (Roblek et al., 2021), and electric carsharing (Liao and Correia, 2020). Nevertheless, although shared mobility strategies such as carsharing have gained significant attention in research communities, media, and public debate during recent years, the overall impact of the sharing economy model on transport is still blurred (Standing et al., 2018). Moreover, a holistic image of the carsharing research themes, hotspots, and tendencies is lacking within the fragmented literature of carsharing services. Therefore, to fill the identified gap, this systematic bibliometric review aims to provide a comprehensive map of the body of knowledge on carsharing services.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first systematic bibliometric analysis on carsharing services in the literature, which significantly contributes to the carsharing field of research through (i) analyzing hotspots and research tendencies in the carsharing literature employing keywords and text mining analyses, (ii) discovering the main research themes building carsharing research background applying a bibliographic coupling analysis, and (iii) identifying potential directions for future carsharing research. Hence, the following research questions (RQs) are formulated and answered in this study:

RQ1

How has the scientific production in the field of carsharing performed over time?

RQ2

What are the hotspots and tendencies of carsharing research?

RQ3

What are the major research themes building carsharing literature?

RQ4

What are the potential directions for future research on carsharing services?

The structure of the paper is as follows. Materials, methods, and the overall research framework are explained in Section 2. The main findings of the research are presented and discussed in three sub-sections, representing descriptive analysis: Publication developments (Section 3.1), carsharing research hotspots, tendencies, and orientations (Section 3.2), and major emergent carsharing research themes (Section 3.3). Section 4 provides the identified potential research direction for future studies on carsharing. Finally, Section 5 delivers the conclusions and limitations of the research.

Section snippets

Materials, methods, and research framework

In this research, a systematic bibliometric review was conducted by employing an analytical method adopted from Ranjbari et al. (2021a), combining keyword analysis, text mining analysis, and bibliographic coupling clustering to provide the state-of-the-art of carsharing research. The bibliometric analysis has been widely used by scholars over the recent years for science mapping and providing an inclusive overview of the body of knowledge in any scientific domain and discipline. The rationale

Results and discussion

To clearly address the RQs of the present review, the results are provided in the following three subsections. On this basis, Section 3.1 presents the descriptive analysis to answer the RQ1, including publication evolution over time, main contributing journals to the carsharing research area, and geographical distribution of publications. RQ2 is answered in Section 3.2, which delivers the discovered research hotspots, tendencies, and orientations within the carsharing literature. Finally, the

Implications for research: directions for future studies

Based on the inclusive map of carsharing research provided in previous sections, the potential directions for further research in the future are presented in this section to address the last RQ of this study.

Having scrutinized the main research themes and trends, hotspots, and theoretical and practical contributions of existing studies within the carsharing literature so far, five main research gaps, as potential directions for future research, were identified as shown in Fig. 9.

Concluding remarks

Carsharing services with the aim of reducing private car ownership have been increasing in recent years. A huge amount of research has been carried out on carsharing considering different aspects from business models and operational challenges to sustainability and travel behavior, leading to fragmented literature. As the first attempt in the literature, our research provided a systematic bibliometric analysis on carsharing research, covering a total of 729 peer-reviewed journal articles in WoS

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgment

The authors acknowledge financial support received from Energy Center Lab, Politecnico di Torino in Italy for this research.

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