As we wrap up our fourth year at Buffalo CarShare, we now serve nearly 600 members with a fleet of 15 vehicles. You also may have heard that we are piloting a bicycle sharing system with 75 bikes. As you’ll see in the following pages, we are not ready to slow down anytime soon - by the time you read this we’ll have launched Get There, our new endeavor focused on growing our fleet from 15 vehicles to 30 by 2015. We hope to accomplish this with support from two major funding partners - the John R. Oishei Foundation and a collaborative program of two state agencies: NYSERDA and NYSDOT.
Even with our grant support, though, we won’t be able to deliver on this growth without support from you: our members, supporters, and partner institutions. So with this ambitious goal in mind, we thought it would be wise to begin a tradition of compiling an annual report to give you details on our impacts, our financial position, and our progress towards our goals.
A few key details:
Our most recent member survey, conducted this winter, shows similar results to our previous survey in terms of who we serve and how our members use the service:
66% of members do not own a car
50% of members’ households earn $25,000 or less
80% have used CarShare to get to the grocery store
30% have used the service at least once to get to a job interview
From these survey responses, we can estimate our annual impacts for 2012 (we ended the year with 12 vehicles and just over 500 members). We calculate that:
Our fleet takes 87 private vehicles off the road
Our service generates $0.9 Million in direct and induced annual economic impacts
We have grown towards what will be nearly a $500,000 budget in our 2013-14 fiscal year.
Looking at the current FY which will end June 30th, 2013, 50% of our income will have come directly from members’ dues and their use of the service, while 45% will come from grant support (largely in support of the BikeShare program) and the remaining 5% from “fee for service” work. As with the 2012-13 Fiscal Year, core CarShare operations remain approximately 90% self-sufficient, with grant revenues and donations driving our expansion, research, and development work.
We hope this information will help you to continue investing in us, whether that’s your time, your energy, your money, or all of the above - rest assured it will go towards growing our impact. We are proud to continue to say that we lead the industry nationally in representing the needs of individuals and families that do not own a car. With your help, we can continue to push these boundaries - leading by both developing and delivering community-driven transportation solutions that have significant environmental and social impacts on our community.