Directions of Carsharing Development in Poland—Analysis of the Need to Expand the Carsharing Zone

Abstract

One of the basic challenges of contemporary transportation policy is to reduce the share of passenger cars used as the primary means of transportation. This problem is particularly important in urban areas, where congestion generates significant economic costs and carries certain risks for the environment and air quality, and, as a result, has a negative impact on the health of residents. In recent decades, many solutions have been developed to support the reduction of car traffic, many of which are part of the concept of sustainable and shared mobility, such as public transport systems and carsharing and bike-sharing systems. The authors have focused on an in-depth analysis of the carsharing phenomenon in both theoretical and practical terms. The aim of the following considerations is to fill the gap in knowledge about the directions of global trends in the development of carsharing and to relate them to the situation in Poland. In addition, the authors carried out an analysis aimed at characterising the degree of activity of using carsharing services at the border of the zone and indicating whether there may be a connection between the location of cars in the border zone and the possibility of transferring to other means of transport. The authors also point out whether increasing the area of carsharing, in this case, seems justified. The research was conducted based on the literature, an analysis of the activities of companies providing carsharing services, an analysis of open public data in this area, and observations.

1. Introduction

The notion of sustainable development seems to be one of many broadly understood, and thus ambiguous, terms in the development of not only management sciences. The multitude of terms makes it a separate scientific discipline for many researchers, as the term is commonly used in many areas of science. The ordering of the defining aspects requires referring to different directions and tendencies of interpretation. It seems that, for this reason, the discussion should begin with a reference to the ambiguity of the term “sustainable development” and its evaluation over the years. The general concept of sustainable development, both in the past and at present, boils down to reconciling and combining into one compatible whole, two contradictory, seemingly antagonistic notions of “growth” and “development” [1]. “Growth” seeks an increase in the matter, while “development” seeks a fuller, greater, or better state through the expansion or realisation of certain possibilities [2]. The concept of sustainable development proposes a new form of conscious, responsible individual and social life, based on the principle of development together with the environment—social and natural, taking into account ecological limitations and social expectations.

An indispensable element of the concept is raising the standard of living of the people, ensuring peace to all the countries of the world, and protecting the natural environment from destruction, by presenting new concepts and ways of solving ecological problems and supporting mechanisms of economic and social development, based on the principles of sustainability and development. Integration of objectives from all dimensions of “sustainable development” is a complicated undertaking, the difficulty of which results from the necessity of integrating various tasks, often very different and sometimes even mutually exclusive. In view of the existing integration complications, no theory of international scope has so far better linked the three areas than the concept of “sustainable development” [3,4].

Sustainable development is not the sum of ecological, social, and economic development goals, but focuses on the interplay of various factors emerging from the three areas presented. Society cannot be understood merely as the sum of social structures and systems that relate to people as an objective reality, but as a process and a certain social product that is permanently reproduced through the actions of individual people [5,6]. In this way, social conditions are created for the ways in which individuals behave, requiring the creation of the possibility of their permanent existence. These prerequisites are meant to enable individuals to acquire qualifications and to shape their lives and social relations in such a way that future generations are enabled with opportunities and resources for practical action [7].

In today’s discussion, social goals should be given an increasingly important role in favour of economic and ecological ones, as only this can result in greater public awareness of environmental sustainability.

The continuous increase in car traffic leads to an increasing climate change impact. In Denmark, car transport accounts for about 20% of carbon dioxide (CO₂₎ emissions related to energy consumption [8]. While other consumption sectors have declined in recent years, emissions from transport continue to increase. There is, therefore, an urgent need to reduce mobility-related emissions. This need for action is exacerbated by the further negative impacts on the environment, public health, congestion, and urban quality of life resulting from a system dominated by cars and private cars. A sustainable transformation of mobility systems is, therefore, needed [9]. While automobility seems to become more and more widespread, new technical and organisational trends may threaten the existing automobile system. Sperling and Axsen and Sovacool [10,11] have identified three dominant innovation trends that will have a huge impact on future mobility: electric vehicles, shared mobility, and automated vehicles.

One of the trends mentioned earlier, shared mobility, can be seen as a service that integrates different forms of transport including carsharing into one comprehensive on-demand mobility service. A MaaS operator offers end users the added value of accessing mobility via one app and one payment channel (instead of multiple ticketing and payment operations). To meet the customer’s request, the MaaS operator offers a diverse set of transport options, such as public transport, carsharing, bike-sharing, taxis, and a combination of these.

The choice of mode of transport often depends on the distance and reason for travelling. Among the factors that most influence the propensity to use a shared mode of transport, the distance travelled by users and the available parking areas play important roles [12].

Mobility as a service (MaaS) implies a shift from car ownership to mobility as a service, e.g., carsharing or ridesharing, which is gaining popularity, especially in large cities. Modern forms of transport, based on technology and the sharing economy, are the most important trend in mobility today, next to green vehicles.

In addition, people who have used carsharing services in their hometown find a higher willingness to use a shared vehicle also when on holiday in another city. Additionally, electric cars are particularly popular [13].

The next step is exactly the introduction of electric cars into carsharing services.

According to the McKinsey Center for Future Mobility [14], shared electric autonomous cars will solve future urban transportation problems such as congestion, smog, and lack of parking spaces while making urban mobility more affordable, efficient, and user and environmentally friendly.

Therefore, the phenomenon of carsharing should be looked at, because only by integrating it as a “permanent tool” into the transport system of cities in Poland will it be possible to achieve sustainable mobility and sustainable environmental benefits for city dwellers. Especially in a situation where the COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on urban mobility, changing the patterns of transport behaviour of people who began to attach more importance to air quality, space, health, and remote work, which became a permanent canon of work, limited the use of private cars [15]. Carsharing systems can provide several benefits both collectively and individually, primarily by freeing up space. Just one shared car can replace the possession of 8 to even 19 cars for private use, and thus “free up” 80–190 m² of space each time [16]. Therefore, it is worth taking advantage of this trend caused by the crisis and implementing carsharing permanently in the functioning of cities.

The considerations in the article are divided into three sections. In the first part, on the basis of a literature study, modern world trends in the development of the carsharing concept are presented. The next part analyses the Polish carsharing market and indicates its level of development. Attention was also paid to the development strategy of the largest carsharing company in Poland. It could be observed that the initially large carsharing network of this company covering around 200 cities is now only over 30. Cars have been moved to the largest agglomerations. This may indicate that the service is limited to only the largest cities with the highest degree of urbanisation. Additionally, carsharing services are often only available in a limited area of the city. To investigate this situation, an analysis was carried out to explain the phenomenon of carsharing zone restriction. Therefore, the main third part of the study analyses the carsharing activity in less densely populated areas within the border zone of the respective carsharing service of the studied city. The conclusions of the study are then presented.

2. Materials and Methods

The research conducted by the authors was aimed at filling the gap in the knowledge on the directions of global trends in carsharing development and relating them to the situation in Poland. The research was divided into two main stages.

• In the first part, a review of the recent foreign literature (2020–2022) was conducted as part of the search, development trend, and definition trend of carsharing. The library database sciencedirect.com was selected for the study. This allowed us to extract the development trends of carsharing in current scientific research. The scope of the study is defined in

  Table 1. Scope of the study of the foreign literature in search of carsharing directions.

  Output:	Carsharing
  Base	sciencedirect.com
  Date of test	21 July 2022
  Years of publication	2020–2022
  Terms/keywords	carsharing, sustainable mobility, trends
  Analysis	title, keywords, abstracts
  Number of publications available	987 (131 open-access)
  The number of publications analysed	30

  Source: own elaboration.

  .

Out of 131 open-access publications, after a thorough analysis of titles, keywords, and abstracts, 30 articles were selected that met the criteria. They contained all the keywords, and the subject of the text correlated with the aim and area of research.

2.

In the second part of the research, at first, an analysis was carried out in order to indicate whether there is and what is the strategy for carsharing development in Poland, and then, an analysis of the status of carsharing development in Poland was made. The considerations were based on an analysis and synthesis of existing data, such as official government documents, reports, documents of national and international organisations, and also data of carsharing companies. Then, an analysis was made to show the direction of the development of carsharing in Poland and to indicate whether there is a need to enlarge the border of the carsharing services zone on the example of a selected city.

In the final part of the paper, conclusions are presented concerning the evaluation of the state of carsharing development in Poland, taking into account the directions indicated in the world literature, as well as practical data characterising the state of carsharing development in the world.

3. Results

3.1. Directions of Carsharing Development—Literature Research

The study conducted allowed us to obtain factors that show the directions of carsharing development, and their analysis allowed us to propose three main categories of carsharing development directions, which were identified based on emerging keywords (from Table 1); their determinations with the corresponding bibliographic supplement are presented in

Table 2. Directions of carsharing development.

Direction	Author	Title	Source	Findings (Issues Related to Carsharing)
Technical and Technological	Giovanni, P. [17]	Exact solutions to a carsharing pricing and relocation problem under uncertainty	Computers and Operations 2022 Volume 144	Multimodal urban transport systems
	Gschwendtner, C.; Konstantin, K. [18] Falabretti, D.; Gulotta, F. [19]	Coupling transport and electricity: How can vehicle-to-grid boost the attractiveness of carsharing? A Nature-Inspired Algorithm to Enable the E-Mobility Participation in the Ancillary Service Market	Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment 2022 Article number 103261 Energies, Volume 15, 2022 Article number 3023	Electric vehicles
	Hartleb, J.; Friedrich, M.; Richter, E. [20]	Vehicle scheduling for on-demand vehicle fleets in macroscopic travel demand models	Transportation Volume 49, Issue 4, Pages 1133–1155, August 2022	On-demand services
	Narayanan, S.; Chaniotakis, E.; Antoniou, C. [21] Lu, R.; Zhao, X.; Wang, Y. [22] Amirnazmiafshar, E.; Diana, M. [23]	Modelling reservation-based shared autonomous vehicle services: A dynamic user equilibrium approach A Tailored Pricing Strategy for Different Types of Users in Hybrid Carsharing Systems A review of the socio-demographic characteristics affecting the demand for different car-sharing operational schemes	Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, Volume 140 2022 Article number 103651 Algorithms Volume 15, Issue 5, 2022 Article number 172 Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Volume 14 2022 Article number 100616	Shared autonomous vehicles (MaaS)
	Luo, K.; Agarwal, C.; Das, S.; Guo, X. [24]	The multi-vehicle ride-sharing problem	WSDM 2022 - Proceedings of the 15th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, Pages 628–63,711 2022 177,374	Ridesharing
	Martí, P.; Jordán, J.; Chamoso, P.; Julian, V. [25]	Taxi services and the carsharing alternative: a case study of valencia city	Mathematical Biosciences and Engineering Volume 19, Issue 7, Pages 6680–66,982,022	Taxis as ridesharing vehicles
Ecological	Vanheusden, W.; van Dalen, J.; Mingardo, G. [26]	Governance and business policy impact on carsharing diffusion in European cities	Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment Volume 108 2022 Article number 103312	External costs, environmental orientation
	Popova, Y.; Fesyuk, A. [27] Turoń, K.; Kubik, A.; Chen, F. [28]	Factors Affecting the Growth of Demand on Carsharing Services Within Smart City What Car for Car-Sharing? Conventional, Electric, Hybrid or Hydrogen Fleet? Analysis of the Vehicle Selection Criteria for Car-Sharing Systems	Transport and Telecommunication, Volume 23, Issue 3, Pages 252–2611, 2022 Energies Volume 15, Issue 12 2022 Article number 4344	Sustainable green city
	Zhang, Y.; Leiming, Li. [29] Yang, H.; Wang, Y.; Jia, R. [30]	Research on travelers’ transportation mode choice between carsharing and private cars based on the logit dynamic evolutionary game model Dashboard Layout Effects on Drivers’ Searching Performance and Heart Rate: Experimental Investigation and Prediction	Economics of Transportation, Volume 29 March 2022 Article number 100246 Frontiers in Public Health Volume 1014 2022	Sustainability
	Burghard, U.; Scherrer, A.v [31]	Sharing vehicles or sharing rides—Psychological factors influencing the acceptance of carsharing and ridepooling in Germany	Energy Policy Volume 164 2022 Article number 112874	Energy consumption in transport and the development of ridepooling
Economic and Social	Jain, T.; Rose, G.; Johnson, M. [32]	Changes in private car ownership associated with car sharing: gauging differences by residential location and car share typology	Transportation, Volume 49, Issue 2, Pages 503–527, 2022	The impact of carsharing on car ownership, including abandoning or delaying a purchase under different car-sharing schemes (1)
	Huang, W.; Huang, W.; Jian, S. [33]	One-way carsharing service design under demand uncertainty: A service reliability-based two-stage stochastic program approach	Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, Volume 159, 2022 Article number 102624	Strategic placement, including the number of vehicles, staff and parking at each carsharing station
	Bauwens, T.; Vaskelainen, T.; Frenken, K. [34]	Conceptualising institutional complexity in the upscaling of community enterprises: Lessons from renewable energy and carsharing	Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, Volume 42, Pages 138–151, 2022	Social enterprises
	Aguilera-García, Á.; Gomez, J.; Antoniou, C.; Vassallo, J. M. [35]	Behavioral factors impacting adoption and frequency of use of carsharing: A tale of two European cities	Transport Policy, Volume 123, Pages 55–72, 2022	Innovative mobility services, resulting in significant changes to transport offerings

Source: own elaboration.

.

In the analysed literature on the subject, there are many terms describing carsharing, indicating its elements or type of functioning, and at the same time determining the directions of development. In the context of these considerations, there are three groups of elements: (1) the ecological aspect; (2) the economic-social aspect; (3) the technical-technological aspect, as well as the factors that influence them. The combination of these three categories is the essence of sustainable development, so it can be concluded that it is the main developmental aspect of modern carsharing. Particularly noteworthy is the concept of MaaS [36], which responds to dynamically changing travel behaviour—from a private ownership-based model towards an access-based model. It integrates the various transportation options available in a given area, offered by multiple mobility providers, and allows you to plan, execute and pay for the entirety of each trip. The basic principle of MaaS is to combine different transport services (public transport, rail and shared transport) to provide the end user with a comprehensive, integrated and multimodal mobility service. This reduces dependence on individual modes of transport, enabling users to have smoother, more flexible and, most importantly, sustainable mobility. Additionally, electric cars are used.

3.2. Strategy of Carsharing Development in Poland

The idea of carsharing emerged in Zurich in the middle of the 20th century. A carsharing scheme was introduced there among members of a housing association. The idea spread in the 1970s to other countries such as France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, but initially without success. It was not until the first decade of the 21st century that there was significant interest in this form of transport. In Poland, carsharing projects emerged in 2016 and initially concerned only passenger cars. Currently, carsharing also applies to the rental of small vans. This form of carsharing is offered, for example, at selected shopping malls and DIY stores. The rental cost is similar to that of a passenger car with the difference that you have to drop it off at a designated location at the shopping centre.

Carsharing has increased in the last ten years within both businesses and companies. Carsharing has emerged in large cities as a model of shared mobility that is very convenient due to its availability, low price, and other advantages, such as sustainability [37].

The basic document concerning the shaping of the directions of the development of transport in Poland is the Strategy of the Sustainable Development of Transport until 2030 [38]. This strategy mainly concerns the necessity of the development of the transport infrastructure, but it also indicates modern solutions facilitating the functioning of the entire transport sector, reducing its negative impact on the environment. One of the desirable directions of action in the field of transport indicated in this document is the support for vehicle sharing systems, also in non-urban areas, including rural areas—a solution reducing the costs of individual commuting as well as the pressure on the natural environment [38].

The directions of carsharing development are of interest to both the state and non-governmental institutions. One of them is the Polish Alternative Fuels Association (PSPA). This NGO was established in 2016 by a group of experts interested in implementing cost-effective and low-carbon energy technologies in transport. Since 2018. PSPA is part of The European Association for Electromobility (AVERE), the largest organisation dedicated to the development of the electromobility market in Europe. PSPA has established the PSPA New Mobility Committee, which is developing a Strategy for the Development of New Mobility in Poland. The committee consists of 18 companies that are market leaders offering solutions and services for new, sustainable mobility. This will be the first, such comprehensive document containing a number of proposals allowing for the implementation of the new transport standard in Poland until 2030.

The goals of this strategy for 2030 are:

-

the number of users of shared means of transport in Poland will reach 10 million;

-

the share of electric cars in carsharing fleets will increase to 50 per cent;

-

a minimum of 3 shared mobility services will be available in 150 Polish cities;

-

the share of RES energy in powering electric shared fleets will increase to 85%;

-

at least 100 thousand shared self-service vehicles will hit the Polish roads.

According to the PSPA, the Polish vehicle park currently consists of about 19 million cars.

Over the last 10 years, more than 7 million cars have been sold in Poland. A significant number of them are high-emission used vehicles [38]. In August 2021, the average age of cars imported to Poland was as much as 12 years [39]. The Polish road infrastructure is not fully adapted to such a large number of vehicles; moreover, the impact of the transport sector on the environment is significant.

Therefore, carsharing strategies can help governments in cities to promote the sustainable development goals (SDGs), specifically Goal 3 on gender equality, Goal 11 on sustainable cities and communities, and Goal 13 on climate action [40]. Thus, the biggest cities in the world are implementing these strategies mainly based on electric mobility in order to build more sustainable cities, but carsharing of conventional cars will also affect the sustainability of cities.

3.3. Characteristics of the Carsharing Market in Poland

There are three operators on the Polish market offering car rental and one that provides vans in a limited area covering three cities. Only the oldest services remain on the market, i.e., those that launched in 2016 and 2017. All operators that started later are unfortunately history. A novelty in the Polish market is the P2P (peer-to-peer) service, which is becoming more and more popular. It allows private cars, both cars and vans, to be shared with other people for a fee. The characteristics of the Polish carsharing market are presented in

Table 3. Characteristics of the carsharing market in Poland (own elaboration based on open data of companies offering carsharing services as of 30 September 2022).

Company	Cities	Fleet	Type of Service by Customer Group
4Mobility	Warsaw Wrocław Poznan Krakow Tricity (Gdynia, Gdańsk, Sopot)	Passenger cars In Warsaw, 300 cars	B2C B2B
Traficar	Warsaw Krakow Wrocław Poznan Tricity Silesia Łódź Szczecin	Passenger cars, vans Largest fleet of fully electric cars 1800 (May 2020)	B2C (TrafiCar) B2B (TrafiCargo) Cooperation with shops such as Ikea, LM, Castorama
Panek	54 cities Ability to move between 80 cities	2500 passenger and commercial vehicles	B2C B2B
HappyGo	Different cities in Poland	Passenger cars and vans; it is an open network and the number of cars changes, it is now around 2500	P2P
WoziBus	Częstochowa Krakow Silesia	Vans	B2C B2B Putting the vehicle down in a designated area

Source: own elaboration.

.

According to the Polish Economic Institute, the number of carsharing users in Poland is currently around 630 thousand. It is forecasted that by 2025 the number of rented cars will grow to about 8.3 thousand, while the number of users will increase to nearly 2 million. High fuel prices, operating costs and traffic congestion, especially in city centres, play a significant role in the growing popularity of shared transport.

The number of cars in the carsharing system in Poland in 2016–2022 is shown in Figure 1.

Access to carsharing in Poland varies between regions [41]. It is illustrated in Figure 2.

Based on the analysis of the data presented in Figure 1 and Figure 2, it can be seen that the greatest access to carsharing is in the Warsaw agglomeration (Mazovia region) and Tricity (Pomerania region). Of the 5438 cars available in 2022, most were in the Warsaw agglomeration (1664 cars) and the Tricity (1136 cars). This represented more than 50% of the cars available in the whole of Poland. These regions also have the largest number of companies renting cars by the minute (Table 3). In the other regions, the number of cars available was much lower. It should also be noted that carsharing companies operate only in the largest Polish cities (Table 3) of the regions concerned.

The idea of carsharing aims, among other things, to reduce the number of cars purchased. The number of passenger cars in Poland per inhabitant is shown in Figure 3. It can be noticed that this indicator is systematically growing [45,46].

In 2020, 28.6% of households in Poland did not own a passenger car [45,46].

A comparison of the total number of passenger cars per 100,000 citizens of Poland and the number of cars in the carsharing system also per 100,000 citizens is presented in

Table 4. Number of cars per 100,000 inhabitants.

	2016	2017	2018	2019	2020
Carsharing	0.01	2.34	7.87	11.68	7.78
Passenger cars in general	56,397.85	58,552.14	60,995.59	63,466.69	65,631.42

Source: own elaboration.

below [45,46].

A comparison of the percentage change (year-on-year) in these indicators from 2017 to 2020 is shown in

Table 5. A comparison of the percentage change (year-on-year) for these indicators from 2017 to 2020.

	2017	2018/2017	2019/2018	2020/2019
Carsharing	100%	336%	148%	67%
Passenger cars in general	100%	104%	104%	103%

Source: own elaboration.

.

Between 2017 and 2020, a steady, stable increase in the number of cars per capita can be observed. It amounts to about 4% per year. Based on the analysis of the data for 2017–2020, it can be determined that the carsharing market is very unstable and it is difficult to predict its development. Initially, it could be seen that there is a lot of interest in this form of activity. However, as mentioned earlier, many carsharing companies have ceased their operations and only the largest ones are left in the market. According to the data presented in Figure 1, however, it can be observed that in the following years, there are more and more cars in the carsharing system, but only the leading players remain on the market.

COVID-19 and the lockdowns kept most of the population at home, which drastically reduced the number of city trips. During the pandemic, carsharing operators adjusted their offers to the new mobility needs of their customers, such as longer rentals, short trips replacing public transport and taxis, as well as increased demand for round-trip rentals as a substitute for car ownership.

3.4. Possibilities of Carsharing Development—Research on the Example of the City of Szczecin

Based on the available information and the conducted research, it is possible to determine the significant changes that took place in the availability of cars in the carsharing system during and after the pandemic. From the example of the largest company providing carsharing services “Panek”, it can be seen that during the pandemic it operated in 200 cities in Poland. The research conducted in September 2022 (Table 3) shows that the carsharing system covered 54 cities. However, according to the latest information provided by the operator, from December 2022 the company operates only in the largest agglomerations, in a total of 35 towns.

The authors decided to conduct an analysis that aims to show whether there is a need to expand the area of carsharing services in the example of a selected city. The study covered the city of Szczecin, which is located in north-western Poland, covers an area of 300 km² and is home to approximately 350,000 citizens. It is the third-largest city in Poland in terms of area and the seventh-largest in terms of population. In recent years, a significant increase in the population of communes that directly border the city can be observed. People living in suburban areas often need to move to the city to get to school or work. Suburban areas also have a poor public transport network. For the purpose of researching this issue, it was decided to conduct an analysis of the activity of using carsharing services at the border of the zone designated by the operator.

The conducted research was aimed at:

• Determining and characterising the degree of activity of using carsharing services at the border of the zone;
• Indications of whether there may be a connection between the location of cars in the border area and the possibility of transferring to public transport;
• Indications of whether there are larger concentrations of cars on the main access roads to the adjacent communes and other areas of the city not covered by the carsharing system.

The research was carried out on 26–28 January 2023 based on data obtained from the mobile application of the operator providing carsharing services in Szczecin (PANEK). It consisted in observing the number of cars at the border of the carsharing zone on three selected days (day 1—Thursday, day 2—Friday, and day 3—Saturday) at specific times of the day at selected hours. Particular attention was paid to the vicinity of the border of the carsharing zone with access roads to/from the city as well as public transport. The area of 1 km from the border of the carsharing services zone and the areas adjacent to the nearest transport hubs in this area was assumed as the border zone.

The test results are presented in

Table 6. Using carsharing services on the outskirts of the service zone—research results.

	The Number of Cars at the Border of the Carsharing Zone
	Day 1		Day 2		Day 3
	All	Close to Main Access Roads and Public Transport Hubs	All	Close to Main Access Roads and Public Transport Hubs	All	Close to Main Access Roads and Public Transport Hubs
Hour
7.30	24	15	26	15	24	17
10.00	25	15	25	15	21	15
12.00	26	16	24 (one outside the zone boundary)	16	19 (one outside the zone boundary)	12
14.00	26	15	25 (one outside the zone boundary)	16	20 (one outside the zone boundary)	14
16.30	25	15	28 (two outside the zone boundary)	18	24 (one outside the zone boundary)	16
18.00	27	17	27 (one outside the zone boundary)	17	21 (one outside the zone boundary)	15
22.00	28	19	27 (one outside the zone boundary)	17	18 (one outside the zone boundary)	14

Source: own elaboration.

.

The table shows the number of available cars at the border of the carsharing zone at the indicated time. We also determined how many of them were parked (available) near the main access roads and public transport hubs.

Based on the conducted research, it can be indicated that the number of cars in the carsharing system available at the border of the zone ranged from 18 to 28. This represented approximately 20% of all available cars in the entire carsharing zone in the city. This is a small amount due to the extensive border of the zone. Based on the analysis, it is possible to indicate a larger number of cars (usually a few in close proximity) located on the main access roads and in places where it is possible to travel by public transport to other areas of the city and adjacent communes not covered by the carsharing system. By examining the number of cars available on the border of the carsharing zone, it can be determined that more than 60% of them are parked at the main access roads and public transport junctions. This allows changing the means of transport for onward travel not covered by the carsharing zone.

However, changes in the number of available cars in the border zone are small and many of them remain in place for more than 24 h, which indicates little interest in renting them. When comparing weekdays and weekends, renting a car for minutes on the weekend is more popular. There are also isolated cases of parking cars outside the carsharing zone. This requires an additional fee. Based on the conducted analysis, it seems reasonable to operate carsharing services only in large agglomerations and, as a rule, in city centres. In the analysed case, there is no justification for increasing the zone within which you can rent a car for minutes. It can be assumed that the inhabitants of suburban areas, when moving to the city centre, prefer their own transport and public transport.

4. Conclusions

At present in Poland, there is no unambiguous nationwide concept of functioning and directions for further development of carsharing. However, concerning the ecological aspect raised in the world literature, the role of this idea is recognised in Poland as one of the ways of supporting sustainable transport, which is reflected in governmental documents or the works of non-governmental institutions. From the point of view of technical and technological factors indicated in the world literature, the role of carsharing as an element of the multimodal urban transport system is not perceived in Poland. However, the share of electric cars in the fleets of carsharing companies is growing. The number of cars that can be rented is growing, but they are available mainly in big cities and only in three companies, and the area where they can move is very limited. In relation to the socio-economic aspect, the growing awareness of society deserves special attention, which is reflected in the dynamically developing concept of P2P (HappyGo), based on renting cars and vans between inhabitants. To sum up, it is difficult to talk about a clear reduction in the use of private cars in favour of carsharing. The interest of citizens in this form of transport is still quite limited and under the current conditions it is difficult to predict how this type of sustainable transport will develop in the near future.

Observing changes in the availability of cars per minute in the example of the described car rental company, it can be pointed out that the initially wide network of carsharing services located in about 200 cities decreased to 35 cities during the pandemic. This is also reflected in the results of the conducted research, which indicate little interest in carsharing at the end areas of the zone, which indicates that it will develop only in large cities and often will not cover the entire city.

However, carsharing is a good solution and allows reducing the number of passenger vehicles on the roads, which results in better organisation of transport and infrastructure, and is conducive to ecology and improving the quality of life of residents, which is the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. State governments, offices, and car concerns should focus on improving the technology of electric cars and carsharing tools in order to meet the environmental requirements of the European Union, and thus increase the comfort of living and functioning of city residents.

5. Limitations of the Findings and Rationale for Further Research

One of the limitations of the research results is certainly the dynamically changing political and, consequently, economic situation of countries, including Poland. These changes are due to, inter alia, pandemics, disrupted supply chains, and the current armed conflict. The lack of economic stability may result in limiting investments related to carsharing and also a significant increase in the operating costs of carsharing companies. On the other hand, it is possible that this situation will cause citizens to give up buying their own car.

Another limitation is that the carsharing concept in its current form is a solution dedicated primarily to urban areas. This is also a fundamental limitation of the concept. From the point of view of companies, this may be an economically unjustified solution due to too little interest in this form of mobility in less urbanised areas.

A properly prepared offer of carsharing may effectively persuade people to give up their cars for journeys within agglomerations, but it will not reduce the need to own a car for further trips.

The challenge for further research into the carsharing concept is to identify how it can be developed effectively given the range of constraints associated with its operation.