Shared Mobility

Strategies to Overcome Transportation Barriers for Rent Burdened Oakland Residents

Alexandra Pan, Susan Shaheen
2021

Shared mobility is gaining traction in the transportation community as a potentially more environmentally friendly alternative to automobile travel and complement to public transit. However, adoption and use of shared mobility by low-income individuals lags behind other demographic groups. Additional research is needed to better understand the transportation needs of low-income travelers and how public agencies, community-based organizations, and shared mobility operators can work together to best serve those needs.

This research fills gaps in understanding the potential policy...

To Pool or Not to Pool? Understanding the Time and Price Tradeoffs of OnDemand Ride Users – Opportunities, Challenges, and Social Equity Considerations for Policies to Promote Shared-Ride Services

Susan Shaheen, Jessica Lazarus, Juan Caicedo, Alexandre Bayen
2021

On-demand mobility services including transportation network companies (also known as ridesourcing and ridehailing) like Lyft and Uber are changing the way that people travel by providing dynamic mobility that can supplement public transit and personal-vehicle use. However, TNC services have been found to contribute to increasing vehicle mileage, traffic congestion, and greenhouse gas emissions. Pooling rides ⎯ sharing a vehicle by multiple passengers to complete journeys of similar origin and destination ⎯ can increase the average vehicle occupancy of TNC trips and thus mitigate...

Public Transit and Shared Mobility COVID-19 Recovery: Policy Recommendations and Research Needs

Susan Shaheen, Stephen Wong
2020

While the COVID-19 crisis has devastated many public transit and shared mobility services, it has also exposed underlying issues in how these services are provided to society. As ridership drops and revenues decline, many public and private providers may respond by cutting service or reducing vehicle maintenance to save costs. As a result, those who depend on public transit and shared mobility services, particularly those without access to private automobiles, will experience further loss of their mobility. These transportation shifts will be further influenced by changing work-from-...

NABSA sets micromobility baseline in first 'state of the industry' report

December 14, 2020
Kristin Musulin

A woman in a black jacket rides a green Lime scooter on a street

The assessment is the first of its kind in North America to show aggregated metrics of the micromobility industry at-large, according to NABSA. The report points to 264 cities in the U.S., 17 in Mexico and 11 in Canada that had at least one bike-share or e-scooter system in 2019.

"Before this, there was really a gap in this kind of data...

Compliance, Congestion, and Social Equity: Tackling Critical Evacuation Challenges through the Sharing Economy, Joint Choice Modeling, and Regret Minimization

Stephen Wong
2020

Evacuations are a primary transportation strategy to protect populations from natural and humanmade disasters. Recent evacuations, particularly from hurricanes and wildfires, have exposed three critical evacuation challenges: 1) persistent evacuation non-compliance to mandatory evacuation orders; 2) poor transportation response, leading to heavy congestion, slow evacuation clearance times, and high evacuee risk; and 3) minimal attention in ensuring all populations, especially those most vulnerable, have transportation and shelter. With ongoing climate change and increasing land...

“Three Ps in a MOD:” Role for mobility on demand (MOD) public-private partnerships in public transit provision

Emma Lucken, Karen Trapenberg Frick, Susan Shaheen
2019

The growing number of public transportation agencies partnering with Mobility on Demand (MOD) or Mobility as a Service (MaaS) companies raises the question of what role MOD companies can, should, and currently play in the provision of public transport. In this article, we develop a typology reflecting 62 MOD public-private partnerships (MOD PPPs) in the United States and present lessons learned. We conducted 34 interviews with representatives from four MOD companies and 27 public agencies. The interviews spanned October 2017 to April 2018. The resulting MOD PPP typology consists of...

Shared ride services in North America: definitions, impacts, and the future of pooling

Susan Shaheen, Adam Cohen
2018

Shared ride services allow riders to share a ride to a common destination. They include ridesharing (carpooling and vanpooling); ridesplitting (a pooled version of ridesourcing/transportation network companies); taxi sharing; and microtransit. In recent years, growth of Internet-enabled wireless technologies, global satellite systems, and cloud computing - coupled with data sharing – are causing people to increase their use of mobile applications to share a ride. Some shared ride services, such as carpooling and vanpooling, can provide transportation, infrastructure, environmental, and...

Mobility on Demand Planning and Implementation: Current Practices, Innovations, and Emerging Mobility Futures

Susan Shaheen, Adam Cohen, Jacquelyn Broader, Richard Davis, Les Brown, Radha Neelekantan, Deepak Gopalakrishna
2020

This report provides Mobility on Demand (MOD) planning and implementation practices and tools to support communities. The report discusses different stakeholders in the MOD ecosystem and the role of partnerships in filling spatial, temporal, and other service gaps. Additionally, the report discusses how MOD can be integrated into transportation planning and modeling. The report also discusses shared mobility implementation considerations, such as rights-of-way management, multimodal integration, data sharing, equity, labor impacts, and the role of pilot evaluations. Finally, the...

Shared Mobility Policy and Modeling Workshop

Susan Shaheen, PhD; Adam Cohen; and Emily Farrar
2019

The market for personal mobility is changing rapidly due to shifting social and cultural trends, as well as technological advances, such as smartphones, information processing, widespread dataconnectivity, sharing, and vehicle automation. Shared, on-demand mobility represents asustainable vision for future mobility with a reliable network of multimodal options that areavailable to all travelers. On March 22, 2019, the Local Government Commission (LGC)...

Bay Area mass transit could start to resemble Uber or Lyft

August 21, 2020
Sam Whiting

Susan Shaheen - in a navy patterned blouse and black pants - sits on a circular bench on the platform at the Orinda BART station in Orinda, California.

Transportation Sustainability Research Center Co-Director Susan Shaheen discusses the potential future of public transit and shared mobility during recovery from and response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Read the full article...