Transition to Shared Mobility: How cities can deliver inclusive transport services

A new study released by the International Transport Forum (ITF) examines how cities can manage the challenges of geographical scale and of transition to shared mobility services.

Initiated by the ITF’s Corporate Partnership Board (CPB), the report expands on two earlier studies that looked at the impact of replacing private cars in a city with shared services, but which did not address the questions of implementing these services and expanding them to a wider, metropolitan area.

Application to this wider territory followed widely the same approach but took advantage of the existence of a network of high capacity public transport services by the introduction of a new type of service-feeders to high capacity public transport services.

In doing this, the results were even better than those in previous studies on just the city area, with three very important co-benefits:

-  Access to jobs and other public services would become much better and more equitable

-  A massive release of parking spaces for other uses of public interest would be possible

-  Introducing the feeder services leads to a considerable increase in the use of high capacity public transport services.

The reduction of traffic volumes, emissions and also prices as the result of a full-scale implementation of shared mobility in a metropolitan area is even more significant than for the core city itself, this study finds, based on detailed mobility data for the Lisbon Metropolitan Area.

For example, total vehicle.kilometres in peak hours are reduced by 55% (compared to 2011 levels) for the metropolitan area, while the reduction for the city alone was 44%. CO2 emissions are reduced by 62% for the wider agglomeration and 53% for the city. This seems largely associated with the possibility of using demand-responsive services based on Shared Taxis and Taxi-Buses as feeders to the various lines of electrified suburban rail present in the Lisbon region.

Shared mobility also makes access to jobs and other public services easier and more equitable and releases massive amounts of parking space: A full 95% of parking spaces could be reallocated for other public uses.

To assure public acceptance shared mobility should be phased in, the report underlines. Each step should be crafted to deliver measurable progress on core objectives (such as reducing congestion and emissions), creating a positive perception of the collective benefits. If aligned with positive user experiences, a strong positive influence on adoption rates should be expected.

The report recommends to:

- Start integrating shared mobility solutions into existing urban transport plans

- Leverage shared mobility to increase use of existing high-capacity public transport

- Deploy shared mobility services in a phased way that maximises public acceptance

- Optimise overall efficiency while assuring a healthy level of competition in the market.

- Limit exclusive occupancy of shared vehicles to avoid the erosion of traffic reduction and CO2 emissions benefits

- Leverage the significant potential of improved territorial accessibility created by shared mobility

- Make Shared Taxi services fully accessible to citizens with reduced mobility.

Download the CPB report “Transition to Shared Mobility: How large cities can deliver inclusive transport services” 

The previous two reports on shared mobility:

- Shared Mobility: Innovation for Liveable Cities (CPB Report, 2016)
- Urban Mobility Systems Upgrade (CPB Report, 2015)

Other CPB reports released this week:

- Shaping the Relationship between Public Transport and Innovative Mobility
- Linking People and Places: New Ways of Understanding Spatial Access in Cities
- Data-led Governance in Road-Freight Transport: Improving Compliance

These reports can be downloaded at http://2017.itf-oecd.org/free-publications