Stated interest, actual use or indifference towards car sharing: profiling students and staff of a university campus in Turin (Italy)

A mobility survey was proposed to the staff and to the students of Politecnico di Torino (a technical university located in Turin, Italy) in autumn 2016 with a focus on the interest and on the current use of car sharing. Turin is in fact offering a relatively broad variety of such services, with several different operators and a fleet of about 700 vehicles. A data mining technique, named co-clustering, is then applied to the dataset of 1314 answers in order to characterise respondents’ profiles and assess to which extent specific combinations of variables describing personal, travel-related or satisfaction with travel aspects are associated with the actual use, the interest or the lack of interest in car sharing. Early adopters of car sharing are more frequently encountered among students than among staff and show more multimodal behaviours. The levels of use of different modes can be helpful in discriminating between mere positive attitudes towards car sharing and actual intention to use it, while travel related satisfaction ratings are rather indicating the interest or lack of interest in this service. Among university workers, younger females living in the outer part of the metropolitan city showed a good interest in car sharing, although the service is not available in the place where they live. Policy implications of such findings within a mobility management perspective are discussed.