Many European cities share the common problem of an increasing number of cars consuming more and more of our urban space. Carsharing (also known as car clubs in the UK) has shown its potential to help organise mobility more efficiently, to regain street space, and to improve the quality of urban life.

Most carsharing operators have a variety of cars in their fleets, allowing users to choose the most appropriate vehicle for any given journey. Fuel and insurance costs are included in the rates, making the cost of every journey highly transparent. The pay-as-you-drive principle, the related reduction of mileage associated with car travel (enhanced by an automatic shift to using more public transport, rail, cycling, walking and intermodal chains) and the availability of a variety of low-emission cars lead to a reduction of emissions and noise pollution. Carsharing is also convenient when you don’t rely on a car for daily transport. Udo will show you why in this short film!

In Bremen, Germany, more than 600 carsharing vehicles are offered at over 150 carsharing stations throughout the city. The network of station-based offers is supplemented by 100 free-floating vehicles as part of a combined carsharing system. More than 24,000 users (as of October 2023) in Bremen use these innovative carsharing systems, many of them as an alternative to car-ownership. With the help of car sharing, public street space in Bremen has been alleviated of more than 7,500 private cars. This means that car sharing contributes to regaining public street space for people with the added benefit of saving the community the cost of expensive new parking garages.

The public mobility stations in Bremen, also known as mobil.punkt, combine a carsharing station on public street space (feat. 4-12 carsharing vehicles) with the offer of public transport, easy cycling and pedestrian access as well as taxi stands and other neighbourhood facilities. Smaller mobil.punkte in neighbourhoods (feat. 2-3 carsharing vehicles) bring the service closer to the users and help improve the driveability of streets for emergency and rubbish collection vehicles through their building style and effect on reducing the number of cars in neighbourhoods. The mobil.punkte make up approximately 1/3 of the total carsharing stations in the City of Bremen.

Inspiring and working together with cities worldwide

Bremen has been working on implementing and providing inspiration on mobil.punkte and carsharing promotion since 2003, particularly in the context of international cooperation in various European projects. Bremen is currently involved in the Interreg North Sea Region project „SHARE-North„, in which collaboration has lead to the launch of mobil.punkte in Bergen, Norway as well as the mobihub concept in Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK.

Bremen as Top 5 Finalist in the 2020 Global Carsharing Award

Bremen was one of five finalist cities nominated in the regional category of of cities with fewer than 750,000 inhabitants in the 2020 Carsharing Award. The awards are a worldwide competition that acknowledge and reward the leading cities for introducing, maintaining, supporting, and recognising the value of a viable carsharing eco-system in their city.

The 2020 Carsharing City Awards is a collaboration between the CSA Carsharing Association and “movmi”, a Vancouver based agency specialising in Shared Mobility Design. 27 international cities were nominated and based on criteria the awards have been chosen by a panel of industry experts. The finalists in the Metropolitan category (over 750K inhabitants) were: Vancouver, Munich, Milan, Calgary, and Madrid/Paris. In the regional category (under 750K inhabitants), the finalists were: Bergen, Ghent, Lisbon, Bremen and Ljubljana.