LT.20.010 – The Route Towards Flexible Demand Driven Shared Mobility Services

An increasing proportion of the population is living in urban areas. A natural consequence of this is the ever-increasing need for urban mobility, which calls for adopting more efficient and sustainable ways to move people and goods around. Besides public transport and private modes of transportation, this has lead to an increased interest in on-demand shared mobility alternatives such as ride-sharing, car-sharing, and electric scooter/bike-sharing.

Ride-sharing platforms like Uber and Lift are in high demand in the U.S. and other places. Research has shown that the average vehicle occupancy of those services is 1.5 persons, including the driver, which can increase the utilization of roads by a factor of 2.8 compared to private car ownership. Furthermore, these services tend to cannibalize demand for more sustainable alternatives such as public transport and bike rides. These disadvantages indicate that this is not something we should strive for in the Netherlands. However, the popularity of ride-sharing platforms shows that there is a significant demand for smart and affordable services that provide personalized transport besides rigid timetable based public transport systems. Furthermore, the COVID-19 crisis shows that flexible smaller scale transport services have advantages beyond service quality.

We aim to investigate and analyze new transport systems and business models that provide an attractive combination of the flexibility of ride-sharing platforms and the transport efficiency of public transport systems. Our research guides policymakers and transport service providers to implement new mobility concepts that continuously adapt to the current demand while keeping urban regions accessible. For this purpose, we study network design and dispatching strategies for shared mobility services using transport supply modelling approaches and transport demand-modelling approaches.

Keywords

demand-driven, Mobility, public transport, ride-sharing