Resumen
Free-floating carsharing, a relatively new market segment within carsharing, is expanding through Europe and North America. This type of system allows users to book a car at any point and any time within a specified area. This type of carsharing currently exists in about 34 cities across nine countries, in cities of highly varied demographics and urban form. Shared vehicles could be part of new mobility services that foster inter- and multimodal travel and serve as an essential part of energy and climate strategies in the transport sectors. However, empirical data on use of free-floating carsharing is usually unavailable for research purposes. New data collection methods have to be developed to evaluate the effects of carsharing systems. For five years, InnoZ (Innovationszentrum für Mobilität und gesellschaftlichen Wandel) has been using web mining to acquire a robust set of data about free-floating carsharing vehicles and movements. Since 2011, about 50 million movements have been recorded by using a web-mining script. This paper provides a first look at this dataset, showing that use of the services is generally increasing over time. It also confirms previous research that household size and residential density are key drivers of free-floating carsharing use.