Shared mobility

Shared mobility refers to the shared used of a vehicle, bicycle, or other transportation mode. It is a transportation strategy that allows users to access transportation services on an as-needed basis. Shared mobility is an umbrella term that encompasses a variety of transportation modes including carsharing, bikesharing, peer-to-peer ridesharing, on-demand ride services, microtransit, and other modes.

Each shared mobility service has unique attributes that have a range of impacts on travel behavior, the environment, and the development of cities and urban areas. Some impacts of shared mobility include enhanced transportation accessibility as well as reduced driving and decreased personal vehicle ownership. Shared mobility programs often yield a variety of environmental, social, and transportation system benefits. These are primarily related to personal vehicle usage and ownership, and vehicle miles or kilometers traveled (VMT/VKT). Shared mobility networks also retain the potential to expand the reach of public transportation by addressed gaps in existing public transportation systems.. They can also provide economic benefits to users in the form of cost savings in some cases.

Shared mobility is a subgroup of the larger sharing economy. The sharing economy is a term that encompasses a wide variety of services, usually involving the online transactions of goods or services as part of a peer-to-peer marketplace. Innovations in social networking, location-based services, and Internet technologies have enabled shared mobility to develop and expand rapidly. By improving efficiency, providing cost savings, and monetizing underused resources, shared mobility services have become widely used in many cities around the world. Although the proliferation of tech-enabled shared mobility has occurred mostly within the last decade, shared mobility services are not a new phenomenon. The first carsharing program was established in 1948 in Zurich, Switzerland, and the first bikesharing program began in 1965 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The rise of smartphone applications and location data increased the feasibility of shared transportation services. These technological advances have enabled the development of carsharing companies, like car2go and ReachNow, ridesourcing services (also called transportation network companies), such as Lyft and Uber, among many other services.

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