Whizzgo has launched a green car-sharing scheme in Belfast. Basically you sign up for a 50 a year fee, and then you can go online and book a car for the hour, couple of hours, a day, a weekend etc. This quite intrigued me as I don’t have a car. I’ve avoided getting one because I live close to town anyway, and also they do pollute! But I do sometimes miss having one – particularly when I need to go food shopping and so on.

So I had a good look at Whizzgo’s rates to see if I could make it add up to being worthwhile for me. The fact that one of their cars in Belfast is parked right outside my house makes it doubly tempting.

It’s 50 a year, and then 5.15 an hour every time you book it, or 37 a day. That includes fuel, and up to 30 miles of travel. I did a quick calculation of how much it would cost me in a year just to use it on supermarket shopping trips.

50 + (12 journeys * 2 hours * 5.15) = 173.60

Now at the moment I walk up to Sainsbury’s (about a 45 minute walk) which isn’t bad exercise, and get a taxi back which costs about 7.00. So taxis for a year shopping come to 84. That means Whizzgo probably isn’t worth it for me, so I’m not going to bother at the moment. It would probably be different if I had family over here I had to go and visit, but I don’t.

You can find out more about Whizzgo in Belfast here.