The role of shared mobility services in post-pandemic urban mobility
María VEGA, Joint Research Center, European Commission., Spain
Panayotis CHRISTIDIS, Joint Research Center, European Commission., Spain
Juan GÓMEZ, Centro de Investigación del Transporte (TRANSyT), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid., Spain
The COVID pandemic has had a great impact in our daily habits and consequently, in daily travel decisions and preferences. Simultaneously, the climate crisis has made evident the need to urgently decarbonize urban transport. This behavioural disruption seems to be the right moment to encourage urban travelers to shift to more sustainable mobility options (Macharis et al. 2021), and shared mobility plays a key role in this transition. For instance, the drop in mobility levels, due to the increasing adoption of teleworking could encourage households to keep lower levels of car ownership (Jain 2021). This effect would be further encouraged by the inclusion of shared mobility services on occasional trips that cannot be done by walking or by public transport. On the contrary, the fear to being infected when using public transport is leading to a more frequent use of private cars (De Vos 2020). Electric shared mobility could help to mitigate the increase in emissions that this trend might cause.
In this work, a behavioural model has been built, aiming to analyze the different substitution patterns that the sanitary crisis has driven between shared mobility services and other urban transport modes. The specific reasons for these changes and their implications for the urban transport decarbonization process are studied in order to make policy recommendations on how to maximize the potential of shared mobility services. We use an EU Travel Survey that provides information on the socio-economic characteristics, as well as on the pre- and post- pandemic mobility habits of 10,153 citizens from 21 European cities. The results show that concerns about health, environmental commitment and road congestion are main factors in the changes on mode choice. Furthermore, the reduction on commuting trips due to teleworking or to more flexible working hours is observed to have an impact on the frequency of use of the different shared mobility services.
Mots clés : Shared Mobility |Post-pandemic mobility |Sustainable urban mobility|EU Travel Survey |Behavioural model
A105220MV