Sharing as a form of social exchange may have existed long before the invention of online sharing platforms, but the growing importance of sharing economy in the 21 century is getting immense and popular, especially in terms of authentic socially engaged forms of sharing platforms and services.

There has been remarkable progress in Turkey’s entrepreneurial ecosystem in recent years with rapid urbanization, accompanied by an increasingly young population, providing unique opportunities for scalable new services.

With this trend in mind, Oğuz Alper Öktem and his sister Sena Öktem introduced e-scooter sharing initiative Martı to Turkey’s ecosystem in 2019 with the promise of a brand-new idea and transportation alternative, adding in a very short time the easier and cheaper travel to Istanbul’s city life.

This brave initiative has proved so popular it has reached millions of registered users in just 3 years, and now their 1800 + employees offer its services in more than 20 cities.

But its founder Alper Öktem is now drawing attention to the inevitable transition to electric vehicles (EVs) transportation, stressing that shared EVs are the most reasonable – both from an ecological and economic point of view – alternative for the cars that are bought for hundreds of thousands of lira and lie idle for 22.5 hours a day.

Öktem underlined that the capacity utilization rate of cars is so low it’s almost a waste of money, supporting his claim with study data showing that an average person spends 10 hours and 50 minutes in his car a week, which translates to only 1,5 hours a day in which the car is used.

Considering that over 25% of the world’s energy consumption goes to the transportation sector, the sharing economy offers the ideal solution that would decrease personal car ownership, save space that is now taken by vehicles, will decrease the time spent in traffic due to decreased traffic congestion and, what’s most important, will decrease the amount of released CO2.

So, sharing rides and using EVs in the process will not only be beneficial to people’s budget and give them more time than they would otherwise spend in traffic but will also decrease air pollution significantly.

Based on a social model of sharing, the ecological, local, and regional values of such platforms are very high and so popular in Turkey that there’s now a whole network that’s bringing together the individual and small-community-based sharing efforts in Istanbul and Turkey to create the awareness on the sharing economy, promote a sharing culture and to support the sharing initiatives -both profit and non-profit.

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