Commission on Travel Demand Shared Mobility Inquiry: Call for evidence

Commission on Travel Demand Shared Mobility Inquiry: Call for evidence

The Commission on Travel Demand is an expert group established as part of our work to explore how to reduce the energy and carbon emissions associated with transport.

The Commission’s first report (available to download here) All Change? The Future of Travel Demand and its implications for policy and planning reviewed declining trends in per capita travel across the UK and the reasons for this. The future work programme will focus on areas of policy which are critical to rapid decarbonisation.

This inquiry focuses on shared mobility and the potential to increase the occupancy of vehicles in-use, reduce individual ownership of assets and enhance multi-modal travel. We are using the term ‘shared mobility’ to mean:

1. Shared ownership: where the use of the vehicle asset is shared across individuals incorporating various models of commercially or peer-to-peer operated ‘car club’s’/car sharing schemes, fractional car ownership, bike sharing schemes.
2. Shared at the point of use: Car/ride sharing (or trip sharing) – rides that are actually shared between different individuals or different parties, sometimes paid separately. In the future, this may include ‘robot taxis’ as shared mobility where the vehicle is shared across individuals.

It is important to note that “on-demand” ride-hailing services –a ride from a taxi or other service provider such as Uber, Lyft – are not necessarily ride-sharing services except where they are formally established to be so (e.g. Uber Pool).

Whilst there is much excitement about the potential for new mobility solutions and sharing to reduce the ownership of vehicles and to intensify their use, aggregate statistics suggest that car occupancy continues to fall slowly and car ownership per capita is rising. The inquiry aims to understand how shared mobility is today, how this is evolving and whether and how it could be accelerated.

Public transport (buses, DRT and rail) all meet the definition of shared mobility but the inquiry will not re-tread well understood factors influencing use of these modes. It will be interested in what the experience of public transport tells us about sharing transport and how new on-demand services are being configured and performing.

The Commission worked through a series of four events which pulled together key evidence and debate about shared transport. Each of the evidence sessions was underpinned by research briefings and the public call for evidence.

Final report

• Shared mobility – where now, where next?

Evidence sessions

• Commission on Travel Demand Shared Mobility Inquiry: Evidence Session 1
• Commission on Travel Demand Shared Mobility Inquiry: Evidence Session 2
• Commission on Travel Demand Shared Mobility Inquiry: Evidence Session 3
• Commission on Travel Demand Shared Mobility Inquiry: Evidence Session 4

Evidence responses

• EV01 – Transport for West Midlands
• EV02 – Liftshare
• EV03 – Urban Mobility Partnership
• EV04 – Community Transport Association
• EV05 – CoMoUK
• EV06 – Department for Transport
• EV07 – Enterprise Holdings
• EV08 – David McKenna
• EV09 – Beate Kubitz

Call for evidence details

Submissions of up to six pages were invited addressing the following topics:

• What do data sources tell us about how shared transport is today and how that has changed?
• Where is sharing happening most intensively across the UK and what is limiting its spread?
• Who is sharing and for what purposes?
• What is different about sharing a car or taxi to sharing on public transport and why?
• What interventions have been effective at stimulating sharing?
• What is the potential to accelerate decarbonisation through sharing?
• What are the implications of sharing for the future of parking? (e.g. increasing pick-up and drop-offs; charging shared electric vehicles; reducing parking for cars)

For any queries related to the inquiry please contact either Professor Greg Marsden or Professor Jillian Anable.

Banner photo credit: Christopher Burns on Unsplash