Why is it more suitable to use 「V辞書形 」 than 「N+の」 right before 「代わりに」 in the following sentence?

Question

The sentence is from my textbook, where I'm asked to pick the correct or more suitable choice from inside ［ ］:

最近［ 車の / 車を持つ ］代わりに、カーシェアリングを利用する人が多い。

According to the textbook, the correct (or more suitable) choice is 車を持つ.

As far as I know, both choices seem fine to me as they follow the required grammar construction for nouns and verbs along with 代わりに.

最近車の代わりに、カーシェアリングを利用する人が多い。Recently, people make use of car-sharing instead of a car.

最近車を持つ代わりに、カーシェアリングを利用する人が多い。Recently, people make use of car-sharing instead of a having a car.

So, firstly,

1) Are both choices right or only the second one is possible?

and secondly,

2) When you join two elements A and B by means of 代わりに, is it mandatory that A and B are the same part of speech?

I suspect that's why the second sentence is the right one, because both elements are verbs (持つ and 利用する) as opposed to noun and verb (車 and 利用する). But it's just my guess.

よろしくお願いします！

Answer 1

Only the second choice makes sense. As Mauro pointed out, the problem is not about grammar but about semantics. The correct comparison here is "owning a car" vs "making use of car sharing". Comparing "car" itself and "(making use of) car-sharing" does not make sense. Is this English sentence really natural?

Recently, people make use of car-sharing instead of a car.

This sounds to me like "not using any car and use car-sharing instead". This is exactly why 車の代わりにカーシェアリングを使う is unnatural.

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2) When you join two elements A and B by means of 代わりに, is it mandatory that A and B are the same part of speech?

Not really. For example, タクシーの代わりにカーシェアリングを使う would sound perfectly fine because they are mutually exclusive options. タクシーを使う代わりにカーシェアリングを使う would sound even a little redundant to me.