“The idea of setting up a car-sharing scheme at the Environmental Campus already existed when I was a student,” remembers Christian Schönemann, partner of EMOS GbR. He would never have dreamed that he himself would make an active contribution to it some ten years later. Together with his colleague Evi Hubig from the Institute for Applied Material Flow Management (IfaS), he founded Elektro-MObilitäs-Sharing GbR, or EMOS for short, in April with the aim of establishing a car-sharing service with electric vehicles at the Environmental Campus Birkenfeld and in the rural region. In this way, the founders would like to provide an impulse for the establishment of electric mobility in the Birkenfeld area and the Hunsrück-Hochwald National Park region, as well as complement the existing local mobility services. By sharing electric vehicles, the purchase and operating costs of a vehicle are spread over several shoulders and the environment is protected. The concept is rounded off by the perfect charging infrastructure of the Zero Emission Mobility Centre (NEMo) at the UCB, which will open in 2020 and which, in addition to solar carports, also has several charging stations.
At the beginning of July, the first two Renault ZOEs buzzed to the Environmental Campus Birkenfeld and have already been booked for shopping trips by students. “Especially in rural areas, getting around without a car is difficult. Although there is a good connection to the surrounding cities through the nearby railway station, larger purchases or excursions in the rural region are only possible to a limited extent with the existing mobility offers. With the sustainable car sharing service from EMOS, I have gained a bit of flexibility,” says Véronique Trabold, a student at UCB. The project is currently running in a test phase with a limited group of users, after which the car-sharing service will be available to all students and staff from the winter semester onwards.
In addition, EMOS GbR will supplement the mobility services for tourists in the Hunsrück-Hochwald National Park in the future. With Neubrücke railway station as the starting point, climate-conscious holidays will also be possible without a car. With this, EMOS is making an important contribution to achieving the project goals of the EU-funded Integrated LIFE Project ZENAPA, which aims to promote electric mobility, especially in rural areas, through selected measures. The founders’ motto is to set a good example and thus contribute to climate protection.
More information on the project is available on the Internet at www.emos-birkenfeld.de