by Innovative Mobility Research | Jul 22, 2015 |
Automobile transportation options have mushroomed in recent years. No longer is it the simple choice of buying or leasing a car for long-term use or renting one for short-term use. Ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft are providing options for those who don’t want to own a car at all, Zipcar and other services are covering the very short-term rental market, and peer-to-peer car sharing services such as RelayRides and Getaround are allowing auto owners to rent out their cars when they are not being used. These services have not collectively taken huge dents out of auto sales yet — but they are likely to in the future, and auto manufacturers are deciding how to address the issue. Susan Shaheen, a UC Berkeley engineering professor and transportation expert, suggests that every vehicle that enters into car sharing full-time replaces four to six sales of new cars and delays up to seven more. Reading the writing on the wall, most auto manufacturers are launching pilot programs to decide how to enter these markets without cannibalizing their sales. Ford chose the route of helping car buyers rent out their cars by teaming with Getaround. To them, click...
by Innovative Mobility Research | Jul 22, 2015 |
Carsharing is an innovative shared mobility strategy that allows for short-term access to a shared vehicle fleet without the costly burden of vehicle ownership. A rapidly emerging model within carsharing is one-way carsharing (also known as point-to-point carsharing), which does not require users to return a vehicle to the same location from which it was accessed, thus allowing users to make one-way trips. Technology has played a major role in the growth of one-way carsharing, including mobile apps, keyless vehicle access, in-vehicle and mobile global positioning system (GPS) receivers, and electric vehicles (EVs). These technologies allow for self-service vehicle access on a 24-hour basis for short-term trips. Yet, one-way carsharing presents unique challenges, such as vehicle rebalancing and parking management. Over the past five years, one-way carsharing has played a growing role in cities. One-way carsharing may prove to be a suitable complement to roundtrip carsharing, public transit, and other shared mobility modes. One-way carsharing can continue to grow through supportive public policies, use of mobile technologies, and its unique cost structure and flexibility or convenience. The impacts of one-way carsharing, however, are only beginning to be documented. Future research should evaluate one-way carsharing’s potential impact on vehicle miles/kilometers traveled (VMT/VKT), auto ownership, and emissions in urban areas, as well as its impact on cities, parking, and first- and last-mile connections to public transit. To read more, click...
by Innovative Mobility Research | Jul 20, 2015 |
There is a growing recognition in the urban transportation field that systems must be more inclusive of low-income communities of color. Our research at UC Berkeley suggests five steps for building accessible systems. At UC Berkeley, we’ve learned from a range of city leaders and planners who are working at the cutting edge of accessible transportation development. In our last blog, we explained why there is no silver bullet for creating more inclusive transportation systems. Instead, cities need to support an assortment of policies and mobility options to meet a diverse range of trip types and be inclusive of the unique needs of low-income communities. Synthesizing lessons from organizations, like the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, Greenlining Institute and City CarShare, we developed a list of five steps that city leaders should consider when designing accessible and inclusive transportation systems in their cities: To read more, click...
by Innovative Mobility Research | Jul 20, 2015 |
Approximately four billion people currently live in urban environments around the world—a figure that is only expected to increase in the coming decades. While cities develop new transportation systems to support their current population and anticipated growth, many gaps exist in the transportation ecosystem. In the past few years, the sharing economy, or shared mobility, has grown to address these gaps, including the rise of bikesharing, carsharing and on-demand ride services. Today, these “shared mobility” services connect many people to their destinations, while others—namely, low-income communities of color—have often been left behind. And there is growing public recognition that we cannot be satisfied with the status-quo. As a result, many planners and transportation professionals are attempting to understand what it takes to create more accessible transportation systems in an era of diminishing public resources and expanding private transportation services. And like many complex urban issues, no one system or policy will be the silver bullet. Rather, cities need to provide a range of progressive policies and transportation choices, both public and private, to limit barriers and provide an array of opportunities for safe, efficient and inclusive transportation. In this blog, we share insights from a recent workshop that the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley hosted with the architecture and planning firm Perkins + Will. At the workshop, “Crossing the Digital and Income Divide: Making Mobility Innovations Accessible to All,” we featured an all-star panel of experts from the San Francisco Bay Area and explored the role of data, empathy, policy and funding to provide mobility services in low-income communities. To read more, click...
by Innovative Mobility Research | Jul 20, 2015 |
Now, however, the carsharing industry is at a turning point where evolving business models — round trip or one way? free-floating vehicles or cars docked at specific stations? — are poised to collide with parallel breakthroughs in ridesharing, electric vehicles and self-driving cars. Though big questions remain about demand patterns, who will drive these futuristic cars and what happens to the data collected by service providers, the opening to increase efficiency and ease congestion in a cost-effective way is increasingly compelling for a range of providers. “This allows flexibility for the operator to serve more people with a single car,” Susan Shaheen, director of Innovative Mobility Research at the University of California, Berkeley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center, told GreenBiz. “When you look at bikesharing, the majority of systems are point-to-point, or one way,” Shaheen said. “About 80 percent of those trips are one way. It provides people with a higher degree of flexibility.” She pegs automakers — more specifically, higher end European automakers — as the leaders to date in one-way carsharing. Several providers favor “floating” models where cars can be parked anywhere, as opposed to more infrastructure-intensive station models like Zipcar’s. “I think that public transportation is a core service and that it needs to exist,” she said. “You’re not going to redistribute rail, but you could redistribute a bus line. You could change the size of a bus. You could make it on-demand.” To read more, click...
