Top challenges in Shared Mobility and transportation in general in 2021. How to overcome these #mobilitynightmares ?????

Since 2020, the world of transportation, especially shared mobility has undergone a tremendous change. It’s quite prevalent. And users, operators, transportation agencies and cities have been knocking at their innovation doors to handle these changes. However, certain challenges have been giving mobility stakeholders the nightmares even from before the pandemic. Even today these challenges continue to pop out their ugly heads and we tend to realize what adverse effects they’ve had on the transportation ecosystem.

What are these challenges and how often do mobility operators/cities come across them? A quick poll across the LinkedIn network revealed some insights.

Over the last week, we looked at a few examples of what impacts these factors have had and also glanced through some of the solutions made available to overcome these.?

1) Growing the multimodal culture across cities

It’s not just about creating the solution, but also ensuring users get convinced to change behaviour. Cities have been aiming to bring multimodality to every user, some have achieved better results than others. Current modeshare still heavily relies on private cars. And the shift is taking way longer (about 5% over a decade) considering we are in a climate crisis today.

Age old economics - supply and demand. The demand for using multiple mobility modes in everyday life is what typically drives and helps sustain, even grow investment in this regard. That means user behaviour sits right at the top of the driving factors for multimodality. That’s not at all independent of other factors. There’s a way to keep incentivizing behaviour change. Pilots across cities reveal certain patterns in which users tend to choose their mode. Top ones are cost, convenience and time taken to travel. And these differ across cities. SkedGo’s pilot in Australia showed that ease of payment and bundle pricing surfaced as top incentives. While Vancouver’s MaaS pilot revealed integrating shared mobility modes i.e. carshare, bikeshare with public transit opened up the option for otherwise non-users to try these services (almost 30% users tried a new mode). Disincentivizing the conventional ‘private car’ mode is as important. It’s a crisis/emergency situation for our climate and that needs radical steps. Curbing on and off street parking allocation must form one of the default climate action plans for cities. Cities such as Mexico are making strides in these areas. It’s about time North American cities pick up the baton. Incentives also must be relevant to operators, after all sustainable transportation needs to meet business feasibility.

Infrastructure investments need to be prioritized and directed towards active transportation, micromobility and the allocation % of road space must shift towards these lighter modes. Slow streets initiatives since the pandemic showed how easy and in-demand these can be. It’s about making the temporary trials permanent implementations.?

2) Striking that gender equity in decision making

Why? Because data shows how a balanced representation among decision makers drives a better and more equitable solution for end users. This in my opinion has been one of the trickiest to overcome.?

With just about 15% of the transportation workforce and far less (<3%) when you consider leadership positions, women are highly underrepresented. Why is this important? Well, genpop! Who we are designing the mobility ecosystem and the solutions need to cater to an average (or better the median) of the user base. In the US, public transit has >50% ridership constituted by female riders. In shared mobility, in every mode i.e. carsharing and shared micromobility, the average user demographic is young male. Does this mean female riders aren’t interested? Or are the services NOT designed with their needs in mind? Only one way to find out. A seat at the table.?

Mobility XX initiative by ITS America’s is a step towards overcoming this nightmare. One step at a time - increasing the number of women in transportation by 10% over the next 10 years. #10in10

Fundamental differences such as women end up having to pay more owing to their specific mobility patterns or needing to think twice before taking public transit or ridehailing because of safety concerns (more so during non-peak hours), makes it detrimental to considering equitable representation for decision making. And then there are certain parameters such as where carsharing vehicles must be located or what should the maximum speed limit be for shared micromobilty (scooters and ebikes).?

movmi’s small step towards bridging this gap has been through the Women in Shared Mobility? (WiSM) initiative over the last 6 years and since 2021, we have stepped the program up a level by introducing the EmpowerWiSM Pitch - which is a pro bono program that helps emerging women-led startups in the world of shared mobility gain access to our network, advisory, improve visibility over the course of a full year. Thanks to our partners, EmpowerWiSM is now entering its second season. More details soon.

3) Developing a DEI compliant ecosystem of new mobility

Nothing, including a pandemic, impacts all tiers of our community equally. There are inequities in every system, but as transportation is the thread that arguably ties our entire economy - as witnessed since COVID-19 - diversity, equity and inclusivity becomes all the more imperative to fulfil.?

This goes with both points 1 and 2 above. Multimodality and ensuring gender equity are vital points in DEI considerations. While cities follow certain well thought out frameworks for evaluating equity in transportation, operators do comply and put their innovative tech to good use in most cases. Here is an example from Lisbon, Portugal of how shared mobility solutions have filled some of the gaps in transportation equity.?

A mix of on-demand transit, shared micromobility, subsidized carsharing all tied to the backbone i.e. public transit network is what usually tends to work best, but very few cities have been able to implement that. Mobility patterns are hyperlocal, and between the huge investments required to extend transit networks and being able to change mobility patterns in a short period of time, shared mobility and multimodal maas can prove very helpful.

Bonus 4) Feasibility challenges of electrification

To round up the list I’ll touch upon a couple of points. The first being electrification. Considering electrification of the highest modeshare - cars. With the public funds allocated towards EV rebates and charging stations, electrifying carsharing stands to create a bigger impact in two ways.?

Carsharing in a city such as Vancouver caters to around 1/3rd of the city population as members. Electrifying carsharing will provide EV access to a far larger set of drivers than private cars. This also means that a larger portion of VKTs while being reduced through carsharing will also get converted to zero emission. Secondly, having regular access to EVs will improve the driver confidence in electric vehicles in general and for car-lite (1 car + 1 carshare) families present a chance to convert their private vehicle to an EV thus increasing EV adoption overall.

Surely not the easiest, there’s a couple of more things to consider while electrifying carsharing. Charging network and supporting government policy are two main ones to bring this closer to reality. Here’s more about what it takes to electrify carsharing.

There you have it! A roundup of the top-of-the-mind #mobilitynightmares from the world of shared mobility in 2021. Do you agree with the list? What’s your biggest challenge as operators/city/user in transportation? Please let us know here on LinkedIn or reach any of our teams at [email protected]

In the meantime, let’s keep building a better mobility ecosystem. One step a day.?

#mobilityforall #sharedmobility #futureofmobility?