Mobility solution lets business travellers use car, bus or trams

NOTTINGHAM is expanding its mobility solutions with the option for local SME business executives to combine car, bus or tram travel in every journey.

It will also add more vehicles and hire sites to its City Car Club programme and will also include a new location dedicated to the city’s first electric car share vehicle. Around 60% cent of City Car Club members in Nottingham are corporate SME customers.

Last year the city council was awarded £37,500 by the Department for Transport through CarPlus to develop Nottingham’s integrated transport network, expanding the City Car Club fleet to 11 locations and 12 vehicles.

There will be three new neighbourhood hubs introduced at key transport interchanges to offer access to a pool of shared cars, local public transport and Citycard Cycle hire. The Citycard, the city’s integrated smart ticket, currently offers train, tram, bus and bike travel. It can now also be upgraded to access City Car Club vehicles in addition to the usual scheme membership card. This means Citycard users can get off the bus or tram and straight into a City Car Club hire car.

Nottingham has the lowest car ownership rate in the UK, so for many the City Car Club means that people who could not normally afford to buy a car have access to a very competitively priced, greener hire car in the city. Some 221 members have joined the project in the last year, with members travelling more than 43,000 miles.

Dan Gursel, general manager for City Car Club, now part of Enterprise Rent-A-Car, said: “Integrated schemes such as Nottingham show that car clubs are taking off by providing a real alternative for everyday travel. From our data we can see that local businesses and residents are already regular users of car sharing here and equally visitors to the city who are members in other locations are also accessing the vehicles.

“From our experience in other cities and in the US we believe Nottingham’s approach could become a model for integrated transport in other cities.”