Bath and North East Somerset Council has cut 11.7 tonnes of CO2 emissions in two and a half years from the adoption of electric car sharing, it says.

The council partnered with E-Car Club, part of the Ubeeqo car sharing service, to provide staff with a low cost, sustainable transport solution and shift its dependency on to electric vehicles.

More than 400 members have registered since the scheme went live, making more than 6,800 bookings and covering 199,585 miles.

Anthony Meehan, corporate sustainability officer at Bath and North East Somerset Council, said: “In little more than the two years we have been in partnership with E-Car, nearly 200,000 miles have been transferred from grey fleet to safer and low emission pool cars, with 39,000 miles of those in zero emission electric vehicles.

“We also believe we have achieved revenue savings by having access to more accurate trip data, enabling us to remove some car trips altogether.”

Starting out with fifteen vehicles managed by E-Car Club, there are now five electric vehicles as well other low emission hybrid cars. The vehicles have also been made available for the public to use outside of business hours.

The council says the car club model is now a key proponent of its Improving How We Work programme.

The E-Car scheme aims to tackle issues such as traffic congestion, improving air quality, limited parking availability, reducing council business miles and staff driving private vehicles.

Patrick Cresswell, managing director at Ubeeqo UK, said: “E-Car’s partnership with Bath and North East Somerset Council is a story of growing success. With more council members signing up each month, we are proud to facilitate this transition to a more sustainable, lower costing form of transport.

“We view this as just a start to sustainable transport in the area and are excited to see how members of the public respond to the scheme being made available to them.”

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