Our building has 24 flats and probably 24 drills. Count how many things stand in yours and how many would do if you shared them. Then see why we won't do it anyway.
Calculated from your numbersCalculated from the numbers you enter. Prices and hours of use are rough estimates, not measurements. What you enter isn't stored or sent anywhere unless you save your result yourself.
How many households are in your building?
Most of the time they do nothing. According to the British RAC Foundation, a car is on the move only about 4% of the time; 80% of the time it's parked at home and 16% elsewhere. Czechia has 608 passenger cars per 1,000 people (Eurostat, 2024), the seventh highest in the EU.
The famous drill number was made up. “A drill is used for 13 minutes in its entire life” isn't based on any study. The oldest version we could trace, from 2007, says “supposedly six to twenty minutes”, with no source. The idea holds, the number doesn't. That's why you set the hours in the app yourself.
It isn't greed, and it isn't phones. Owning a thing buys three things at once: control (I can do it now and ask no one), a piece of identity and a place of my own. That's how psychology describes the roots of the feeling of ownership. Sharing, on the other hand, costs arranging, waiting and owing a favour.
Privacy behaves like a product. Once we can afford it, we buy it.
The average Czech household now has 2.15 people, and one-person households grew by a third between the 2011 and 2021 censuses. With every thing we buy, one reason to ring a neighbour's doorbell disappears. The money is beside the point; what matters is what it buys: independence from the people around us.
This isn't about selling your car. Pick one or two things you'll borrow, or lend to a neighbour. For the people, not for the money.
How it works
Items in the building = households × ticked things. How many would do: for each thing, hours of use per year × households, divided by the hours a shared thing can realistically be used, rounded up (at least one). We assume a shared thing can be used at most 10% of the 8,760 hours in a year: the rest goes to night, peaks (everyone does laundry on Saturday), arranging and handing over. That's this article's assumption, not a measurement, so the result is a lower bound; in practice you'd need somewhat more.
Hours of use are estimates you can change. There are no data for drills, stepladders or ladders (see the 13-minute myth). Bike: an hour a week. A suitcase is “in use” while it travels, about 10 days a year. The list of things differs for flats and for houses. Car: 4% of the time on the move (RAC Foundation, British data) is about 350 hours a year. Prices are rough prices of new items in Czechia, in Czech crowns (CZK); for the car, a small new car rather than the market average. In use: the average share of the year the ticked things are used, each thing weighted equally.
The explanation “privacy behaves like a product” is this article's view, not a study's finding. Nothing is stored or sent; the share card is created right in your browser.
Sources
- RAC Foundation: Spaced out, perspectives on parking policy (Bates and Leibling, 2012)
- Eurostat: Passenger cars per thousand inhabitants (road_eqs_carhab), 2024 data
- Workshopshed: Drills only used for 10 minutes (2016), origin of the drill number
- Pierce, J. L., Kostova, T. and Dirks, K. T. (2003). The state of psychological ownership. Review of General Psychology, 7(1), 84–107
- Czech Statistical Office: Two fifths of households in Czechia are single persons (2021 Census, in Czech)
